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Philosophical narratives do not offer a universal
.Preface
Nancy Tuana
Take into your hands any history of philosophy text. those characteristics that are taken to deﬁne us as human—are associated with traits historically identiﬁed with masculinity. If the ‘‘man’’ of reason must learn to control or overcome traits identiﬁed as feminine—the body. Although women are omitted from the canons of philosophy.1 with grudging entrance to those few women who are capable of transcending their femininity. Feminist philosophers have begun to look critically at the canonized texts of philosophy and have concluded that the discourses of philosophy are not gender-neutral. her desires. The student is to assume that she or he is about to explore the timeless wisdom of the greatest minds of Western philosophy. Since these texts are often designed for use in undergraduate classes. the emotions. This process of deﬁnition occurs in far more subtle ways when the central concepts of philosophy—reason and justice. irrationality. delineating her proper role. Other times the message is indirect—a passing remark hinting at women’s emotionality. You will ﬁnd compiled therein the ‘‘classics’’ of modern philosophy. No one calls attention to the fact that the philosophers are all men. her abilities and inabilities. these texts inscribe the nature of woman. the editor is likely to offer an introduction in which the reader is informed that these selections represent the perennial questions of philosophy. Sometimes the philosopher speaks directly about woman. the passions—then the realm of rationality will be one reserved primarily for men. unreliability.

to be fully aware of the impact of gender biases. both those authors who have been part of the traditional canon. Although I do not accept the position that the current canon has been formed exclusively by power relations. the perspective most likely to be privileged is that of upper-class white males. What is and is not included within the canon during a particular historical period is a result of many factors. no canonization of texts that excludes all but a few women can offer an accurate representation of the history of the discipline. Beauvoir. and those philosophers whose writings have more recently gained attention within the philosophical community. feminist lenses will be focused on the canonical texts of Western philosophy. moral or metaphysical. Marx. the index. Aristotle. Thus. Given the history of canon formation in Western philosophy. but rather privilege some experiences and beliefs over others. as women have been philosophers since the ancient period.2 I share with many feminist philosophers and other philosophers writing from the margins of philosophy the concern that the current canonization of philosophy be transformed. Nietzsche. Wittgenstein. Mill. Kant. it is imperative that we re-read the canon with attention to the ways in which philosophers’ assumptions concerning gender are embedded within their theories. the essays are also selected to illustrate the variety of perspectives within feminist criticism and highlight some of the controversies within feminist scholarship. Plato. Hume. These experiences and beliefs permeate all philosophical theories whether they be aesthetic or epistemological. Each volume will offer feminist analyses of the theories of a selected philosopher. Since feminist philosophy is not monolithic in method or content. Yet this fact has often been neglected by those studying the traditions of philosophy. I do believe that this canon represents only a selective history ´ ´ of the tradition. is designed to foster this process of reevaluation. This new series. I share the view of Michael Berube that ‘‘canons are at once the location. it is not my intention to rectify the current canon of philosophical thought. There are all too few women included. In this series. Locke. Hegel. Re-Reading the Canon. and those few who do appear have been added only recently. Descartes. Foucault. In creating this series. Wollstonecraft. and the record of the struggle for cultural
. Although no canonization of texts will include all philosophers. Derrida. A glance at the list of volumes in the series will reveal an immediate gender bias of the canon: Arendt. Rousseau.viii
Preface
perspective.

Y. In asking this question attention must be paid to the ways in which the deﬁnitions of central philosophical concepts implicitly include or exclude gendered traits.
. ´ ´ 3. it is a realm reserved for a group of privileged males. Such a re-reading shifts our attention to the ways in which woman and the role of the feminine are constructed within the texts of philosophy. they must be continually reproduced anew and are continually contested. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson. Along with the process of uncovering women’s philosophical history. Paying attention to the workings of gender within the texts of philosophy will make visible the complexities of the inscription of gender ideologies. rather than abandon the whole idea of a canon. 1987). N. This type of reading strategy is not limited to the canon. since the texts also inscribe race and class biases that thereby omit certain males from participation. Michael Berube.Preface
ix
representation. attests to this presence of women. 2. 1992). but can be applied to all texts. 4–5. A question we must keep in front of us during this process of re-reading is whether a philosopher’s socially inherited prejudices concerning woman’s nature and role are independent of her or his larger philosophical framework. Pynchon. This process of recovery and examination must occur in conjunction with careful attention to the concept of a canon of authorized texts. It is my desire that this series reveal the importance of this type of critical reading. More properly. like any other hegemonic formation. do we instead encourage a reconstruction of a canon of those texts that inform a common culture? This series is designed to contribute to this process of canon transformation by offering a re-reading of the current philosophical canon. A History of Women Philosophers (Boston: M. and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca. Nijoff.’’3 The process of canon transformation will require the recovery of ‘‘lost’’ texts and a careful examination of the reasons such voices have been silenced. Are we to dispense with the notion of a tradition of excellence embodied in a canon of authorized texts? Or.: Cornell University Press. Mary Ellen Waithe’s multivolume series. we must also begin to analyze the impact of gender ideologies upon the process of canonization.
Notes
1.

.

Patricia Jagentowicz Mills introduced me to the work of Theodor Adorno in graduate school. Several essays were presented at the 2003 Western Political Science Association meeting. I thank Victoria Grace and the Sociology/Anthropology Department for that opportunity. Mary Franks gave some valuable help in a tight spot with some of the work. Ann Ferguson encouraged my ongoing interest in the value of his work for feminist purposes. New Zealand. All the contributors have been a pleasure to work with. Rose and Hannah Heberle-Rose top the list of those who make my life of work and family possible and sane. Many thanks go to the editors working on this series. I had the opportunity to present my work on Adorno at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. William D. where Judith Grant took on the task of discussant. and to the anonymous reviewers at Penn State Press for their supportive responses to this work. to Nancy Tuana and Sanford Thatcher. encouraging the forward movement of the project.
. in the spring of 2005.Acknowledgments
This volume would not have come to completion had it not been for the support and interest of a number of people. Thanks to the Department of Political Science at the University of Toledo for their support.

.

2 The contributors do the work necessary
. there are good reasons to ‘‘go back to Adorno. nor do I wish to attempt an introductory explanation of his ideas to the reader. and about sexuality.’’1 In this introduction I will elaborate on some of these reasons.1
Introduction: Feminism and Negative Dialectics
´ Renee Heberle
The contributors to this volume look at issues in feminism using insights from Theodor Adorno and reread Adorno using insights from feminism. I cannot possibly do justice to the scope and complexity of Adorno’s thinking here. he offered little in the way of sustained argument about them. Nonetheless. While Adorno had many thoughts about women. given the questions feminism raises and the questions raised about feminism. about modern feminism.

Critically examining the troubled and troubling status of ‘‘woman’’ is among the many projects of feminism and contributes to its vitality as a ﬁeld of inquiry and politics. in 1903. And the contingent status of ‘‘women’’ drives the restless. and his aunt. It is a ﬁeld of inquiry that grows in intensity and effectiveness precisely through its disagreements and resistance to closure. for it created the historical circumstances that forced him into exile. it is simultaneously diagnostic and symptomatic. woman refers to an object of inquiry. Concretely. Lisa Yun Lee takes as her point of departure an intensely personal experience that has traditionally been interpreted as indicating Adorno’s aversion/distance from the body. was a pianist. In patriarchy. particularly the feminine body. Adorno spent his later life in Germany as a wellestablished ﬁgure in academia. He was raised an only child of privilege in a solidly middle-class milieu. conﬂictual quality of feminism in theory and in practice. Much of Adorno’s thinking predicts some of these basic conundrums of feminist theorizing. that is. His Jewishness plays a profound part in his thinking. that object comes diffusely apart as critical attention is paid to the terms of its existence and its particularity.2
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
to move the reader into the arguments. I do hope to highlight some of his most compelling insights and ideas about the task of philosophy. who helped raise him. Lee shows this interpretation to be wrong. It is commonly remarked upon that he was raised by women in an extremely protected environment and that this may have something to do with his sensitivity toward the suffering of women as participants in bourgeois society as well as with his seeming nostalgia for the nineteenth-century ideal of the family as a space of nurturance for the autonomous bourgeois individual. Feminism is critically reﬂexive about its status as a protest against conditions that make it possible. Germany. His mother was a professional singer. to show some afﬁnities between Adorno and feminist concerns. women are conceptually interchangeable. and thus entice the reader into an engagement with the chapters that follow. It was his experience of exile that inspired some of his famously melancholy works. pointing out that Adorno’s work is deeply informed by concern
. There is little else in the way of biographical information that would tell us in any direct fashion how we as feminists might approach Adorno’s work. in Chapter 3. Conceptually. they are not. Concretely. reﬂects on how the interpretation of the Odyssey in the Dialectic of Enlightenment stands in for Adorno’s own exile and relationship to the feminine. However. In Chapter 6. Adorno was born to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father in Frankfurt. Rebecca Comay.

Adorno’s work may have unintended (by him) consequences for feminism that can only be discerned through open-ended and experimental approaches to his work. which is open and experimental in its own right. The difﬁculty of his form and style of writing was inherent in what he regarded as the task of critique: to express the complexity of what only seems simple to the common sense prevalent in the
. He was famously opposed to instrumentalizing thought. indeed sometimes viliﬁed. as if each were a predetermined object. ‘‘[d]irect communication to everyone is not a criterion of truth.Introduction
3
with the body and with somatic suffering and that the body ﬁgures deeply in his philosophical work. Critics of her work often suggest that it is not feminist of her to use complex language to express ideas. for his apparent inattention to the accessibility of his work. if possible—whereas at present each communicative step is falsifying truth and selling it out. authors in this volume rethink his work in light of historically speciﬁc challenges faced by feminism and in light of diverse understandings of our present condition. Further. While it is clear that Adorno concurs with many feminist sensibilities about Western philosophy and Enlightenment thinking. and to rate it higher. The chapters that follow are written in this spirit.’’3 These kinds of questions continue to alternately plague and inspire feminists. Apart from these biographical references. bringing it to feminism and bringing feminism to it.4 Adorno would have scorned this rhetorical dismissal of critique that demands serious and prolonged attention from the reader. it is Adorno’s work in itself with which authors in this volume engage. litmus tests of the intent of thinkers regarding the lives of women or analyses of gender relations typically obscure more than they reveal about the possibilities for thinking about women and gender relations offered by Western philosophy. whatever has to do with language suffers of this paradoxicality. However. Rather. Adorno was criticized. the value of her ideas was dismissed as the question of whether her work was or should be accessible to a general readership became the issue. Judith Butler was recently criticized speciﬁcally for using difﬁcult language. Following the pattern established in other volumes in this series. Meanwhile. We must resist the all but universal compulsion to confuse the communication of knowledge with knowledge itself. each contributor rereads Adorno against the grain of his or her own thinking. Adorno himself would protest the ‘‘application’’ of his work—as if we were testing it for feminist purposes. our goal here is not simply to judge whether his thinking is good for women. with one waiting to be applied to the other. for him.

to render the familiar strange. This. though the two remain signiﬁcantly different enterprises. so as to catch up with the experience. The excessive quality of thought and the instability of the object conditions philosophical inquiry. It is about articulating the irreconcilable quality of the movement of thought and experience in history. for Adorno. he considered form to be as important as content to the meaning of any written text. Adorno departs from Hegel (and Marx) in suggesting that there is no potential reconciliation of subject and object. not made. critical theory is not about ﬁnding ﬁnal answers or revealing truth. in order to break out of bourgeois idealism and into revolutionary materialism. they are the recoil of the unfolded. but it does not work with or tell the truth. Adorno rejects the notion that any concept is adequate to its object or that the nature of the object could ever determine the truth of the concept. not one that will presently or ultimately merge with it. It is about a truth that challenges history. unfold from within history itself. Its answers are not given. both men engaged in a kind of materialism that took the moments of reality as riddles to be solved rather than as given facts to be identiﬁed. For Adorno. Thus he supported speculative thinking against positivism. philosophy has in common with art. philosophy is about truth. History does live in the object but is neither determined by
. which Susan Buck-Morss explains as ‘‘argumentation from within. In Negative Dialectics. of self and other.4
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
historical moment. Unlike art. historically developed logic. Further. and to open pathways to alternative thinking and practice. Truths. most political (as in opening up new spaces for public contestation) sense. In his materialism the dialectic remains negative.7 Walter Benjamin was arguably the contemporary by whom Adorno was most inﬂuenced. philosophy knows no ﬁxed sequence of question and answer. as for Hegel. not generated. on the basis of philosophy’s own inherent.’’5 Feminism’s questions have been shaped by experience. Adorno was committed to the project of philosophy as interpretation. Learning how to ask questions about that which is most taken for granted in everyday life is a crucial concern for feminists. Thus Adorno is committed to a philosophy that engages in immanent critique. of concept and object.8 Departing from orthodox Marxism. he says. he argued. empiricism. Its question must be shaped by its experience. This is a legacy of the insight that ‘‘the personal is the political’’ in its nonproscriptive. yet indebted to its insights. and what he called the dogmatics of ontology. transparent question.’’6 However. ‘‘Unlike science.

at least their ﬁnal and deepest ﬁndings. Adorno’s philosophy challenges the dualisms that structure Western thinking. but to interpret unintentional reality. . disappearing traces within the riddle ﬁgures of that which exists and their astonishing entwinings. Adorno exposed such instrumental reason as a new mythology. of critical cognition. naturalizing force of historically constituted notions of masculinity and femininity. perhaps the everlasting paradox: philosophy persistently and with the claim of truth. The following quotation best sums up Adorno’s understanding: The central difference [between science and philosophy] lies far more in that the separate sciences accept their ﬁndings. by the power of constructing ﬁgures. in that. whereas philosophy perceives the ﬁrst ﬁndings which it lights upon as a sign that needs unriddling. or images (Bilder). In this remains the great. out of the isolated elements of reality it negates (aufhebt) ques-
. but worked against each other to show their untruth as independent things-in-themselves. he considered the work of deconstructing these dualisms to be ongoing. Adorno called for the control of that nature by reason. mythic. of sorts. ‘‘The task of philosophy is not to search for concealed and manifest intentions of reality.’’10 This is echoed in feminism. They would not be thought away in their immediacy. must proceed interpretively without ever possessing a sure key to interpretation. or desire and Reason. Susan BuckMorss shows how the use of antithetical concepts provided Adorno with a method. . but where rational control of nature took the form of domination. but where reality was posited as anarchic and irrational. Rather. Adorno tells us. Plainly put: the idea of science (Wissenschaft) is research. Where nature confronted men as a mythic power. Further.9 In common with that of feminists. as indestructible and static. ‘‘That which appeared as rational order in bourgeois society was shown by Adorno to be irrational chaos. nothing more is given to it than ﬂeeting. . culture and social structure. Where some feminists have shown the historicity of presumably natural qualities of sexed existence. He did not suppose he would reconcile through theory the contradictory forces of nature and history. that of philosophy is interpretation.Introduction
5
nor determines its nature. Adorno exposed the class order which lay beneath this appearance. others have shown the irrational.

As it is for feminists. He considered the popular responses of his time to this decay to be dogmatic. a task to which philosophy always remains bound. Further. which speaks to feminist concerns about essentialism and identity politics (see particularly Gillian Howie’s contribution to this volume. Benjamin) in orientation. Negative Dialectics (1966). access to authentic experience withered with the possibilities of an authentically individualist social order in late capitalism. concrete.6
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
tions. Chapter 15). he argued that these approaches obscured the tragic dimensions of lived dialectical tensions between the extremes of mythology and Enlightenment rationalism and between nonhuman nature and inhumane history. but not because it tells the truth about oppressive social conditions. and in part as a response to these criticisms. lived experience is fundamental to Adorno’s work.’’ Constellational thinking rejects identity thinking and challenges dualistic presuppositions. Thus feminist theorizing has become increasingly attuned to its contingent. It is thus signiﬁcant for feminist purposes. but also that unconditionally identifying women as such obscures as much as it illuminates about the quality and experience of oppression in general. Sartre) or Marxist (Brecht. conditional status as a ﬁeld of inquiry.’’ Essentialism became a problem rather than a solution to the question of unity among women as black feminism and feminists of color told white feminists not only that having gender identity in common is partial in its constitutive power. pursuits of origins and causal explanations for oppression were brought into question. as some feminists adopted poststructuralist and deconstructionist approaches to interpreting gendered experience. elaborates his theory of the nonidentical. because its power of illumination is not able to catch ﬁre otherwise than on these solid questions. Feminism is concerned with the difference that is ‘‘woman’’ and the differences that constitute the category of ‘‘women. whether they were existentialist (Heidegger. but rather to heightened sensitivity of the transformative possibilities offered by not
. For Adorno.’’11 From Walter Benjamin. Adorno’s major philosophical work. This is an attunement that should lead not to pessimism or paralysis. ‘‘Interpretation of the unintentional through a juxtaposition of the analytically isolated elements and illumination of the real by the power of such interpretation is the program of every authentically materialist knowledge. Adorno borrowed the term constellation to describe what they were doing in interpreting ‘‘reality.’’ This is the materialism Adorno advocates. the exact articulation of which is the task of science.

My own contribution (Chapter 10) offers insight into how ‘‘experience. Adorno’s insistence on the primacy of the object encourages this nonidentitarian approach to knowledge. perhaps irrevocably. It is that the object does not go into its concept without remainder and that the space between indicates simultaneously the failure and the hope of Enlightenment thinking. theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal. at base. but to a combination of numbers. Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object.’’ a concept crucial to feminist theorizing and one that is often subjected to the forms of thinking just described. I proffer an alternative to thinking about experience as either an authoritative source of truth or as a construction we can only understand through the conditions of its emergence and articulation. For Adorno.Introduction
7
taking anything for granted about one’s object of inquiry. parts of the self that are ‘‘objectively’’ conditioned by historical circumstance. As a constellation. Contrary to widely held belief. his constellatory thought insists on the primacy and many-sidedness of the object. hoping that it may ﬂy open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response.12 He self-consciously used reason to critique the categorical Reason of traditional philosophy. Adorno’s claim about nonidentity is. or essentialism. partly because we cannot know ourselves completely and therefore will always be obscuring. not to a single key or a single number. social constructionism.
.13 Constellations suggest a move away from what have been some deﬁning terms of feminist method: determinist thinking wherein we can know in advance the source of woman’s suffering. fairly straightforward. but still drops subjectivity from the equation. rationality should not be subject centered. He says of constellations: The history locked in the object can only be delivered by a knowledge mindful of the historic positional value of the object in its relation to other objects—by the actualization and concentration of something which is already known and is transformed by that knowledge. As noted above. which is more historical. which will ﬁnd the truth of ‘‘woman’’ within the subject. might be understood through constellational interpretations. but not as an object in itself. Adorno was not anti-Enlightenment.

14
. that emanated from his work ultimately made him an unlikely ﬁgure to inspire those who came to assert the need for a programmatic critique that would guide radical social action. However. but in lateral motion as well.
Adorno and Praxis
Adorno died in 1969 at the age of sixty-six. even pessimism. He became a signiﬁcant. theoretical and political. Adorno did actively avoid association with collective politics and action. His untimely death came at the height of the new leftist and student movements.8
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
Adorno writes. written with Max Horkheimer. It is a founding text of the Institute for Sociological Research. The truth is not in them. his skepticism toward all forms of positive theory. It can pick up some cues from Adorno in order to take another look at some basic conundrums of feminist work. but typically as an afterthought or as an otherwise minor consideration. For Adorno the relationship between theory and practice is a critical point in the constellation of concrete concerns that drove his life and work. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. but is in their historical movement. It departs from orthodoxies about the necessity of the domination of nature and the inevitability of progress that were found in orthodox Marxist critiques of capitalist administrative society. served to focus students’ attention on their felt alienation from bourgeois consumer society. even leading. ﬁgure in radical intellectual circles in Germany upon his return to that country in 1949. ‘‘The truth of music is inextricably bound to its transiency. Adorno’s critique of progress. not only in forward motion. and coincided with the burgeoning women’s movement. In all his writings he addressed questions about the relationship between thinking and political commitment. in Western industrialized countries. These questions are addressed by other thinkers. between art and political commitment.’’ This claim can be applied to his thinking about the truth of the self and experience. and the profound aura of melancholy. and the place of critique in contemporary mass society. His life and work had been profoundly marked by the rise and subsequent violent demise of the Fascist state in Germany and by his own experience of forced exile to England and the United States just before the war. Feminism approaches this understanding in many of its modes of theorizing. popularly known as the Frankfurt School. But his reasons for doing so deserve our attention.

and feminist matters. since the early 1970s. been slow to pick up on Adorno’s work. The interview shows how she weaves the idea of negative dialectics into her feminist theorizing about ideality as a space of struggle. Herbert Marcuse and. However. showing how Zee demonstrates the concrete materiality of women’s bodies.15 I would argue that Adorno’s nuanced theorizing about the constitutive quality of the object. The interview with Cornell reveals the ways in which Adorno continues to inﬂuence her thinking about legal.
The Contributions
We open the volume with an interview with Drucilla Cornell. Marcuse’s optimistic use of Freud and Marx to resolve modern forms of alienation from self and other and Habermas’s faith in the potential for transparency in rational forms of communication have been important references for contemporary feminist theorizing of conditions of gendered and sexual freedom. Jurgen Habermas ¨ have remained the most visible representatives of the critical tradition spawned by scholars associated with the Institute for Sociological Research. including feminists. Cornell is probably best known for her theorization of the imaginary domain as a site of individuation and freedom. and crucially. She discusses the re-presentation of the feminine in the feminist pornography of Ona Zee. in the United States have. critical theorists. after him.Introduction
9
In spite of this wealth of material. has reemerged as the debates about modern and postmodern theorizing have become somewhat threadbare. cultural. After several minutes of what appears to be a ‘‘normal’’ porn scene. Zee stops the sex acts to show what women who are menstruating must do in order to continue to work on porn sets during their period. his consequent insistence on the complexly mediated quality of intersubjective relationships. This highlights the negativity of women’s bodies against which the male fantasy must always work to sustain a phallocentric ideal of the feminine. For Cornell this is the negative dialectic in action. always at a steady but rather low ebb among critical thinkers. his thinking about suffering and memory may help contemporary critical thinking point beyond itself. which always already negates the male fantasy of women as always absolutely knowable as an object.
. interest in Adorno.

even intimate. Culture. rereads the Dialectic of Enlightenment as representative. In Chapter 4. edited by Maggie O’Neill. but it is indebted to dialectical theory in that for Cornell.’’ Cornell recognizes the difﬁculty of conceptualizing such a space. even symptomatic. in Chapter 3. in Chapter 5.10
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
Cornell’s conceptualization of the imaginary domain as a never fully constituted space that should be protected by law provides a corrective to the liberal notion of a self that is always already there to be protected. of Adorno’s own troubled exile. Minima Moralia (1947). which are in turn continually shaping and shaped by her relations with others. Comay. and Feminism (2001). there has been little feminist attention to Adorno’s work. and the melancholy hope for something different is lodged in complex ways in the various deployments of woman as allegory for the seductions of modernity. those by Rebecca Comay (2000) and Andrew Hewitt (1992). Comay draws out the ways in which Adorno’s personal experiences haunt the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Love as that which can be most consuming and most particular in human experience has been the subject of much philosophical concern. in spite of its own critique of instrumental thinking. in tone and content. looks at this most intimate of Adorno’s works to show the place of love and desire in Adorno’s thinking generally. Apart from an excellent collection of essays on feminist sociocultural theory titled Adorno. Eva Geulen. written shortly after the Dialectic. instrumentalizes the ‘‘feminine’’ as a cipher for the deindividuating effects of modernity. The vulnerabilities of the bourgeois patriarch are critically elaborated in the excursus on Odysseus. Adorno’s volume of aphorisms. Her theory of the imaginary domain does rely on the liberal idea of individuality as critical to freedom. The interview shows how a critical reading of Adorno can inform contemporary feminist theory and activism and challenge our thinking about the relationship between theory and activism. is purposively personal. individuation is a process that moves within and against the limits of the individual’s own horizons. Geulen argues that ‘‘none of
. Hewitt allows us to see how the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this volume we include only two previously published works. Following the insights of critical theory that it is not only that our preferences as preconstituted subjects are shaped by the culture industry but also that our subjectivity itself is ‘‘pounded into a being who has lost the ability to distance ourselves from the bombardment of images that promotes the endless push to consume more and different products.

In 1969 female students embarrassed Adorno during a lecture by rushing to the podium in a planned moment and baring their breasts while caressing him and throwing rose petals over his body. to the transitory selﬂessness experienced in the moment of love. the very insight into human experience we may need to continue to hope for something different in damaged conditions. She uses the (in)famous scene of Adorno’s humiliation in the seminar room when. The protest was inspired by contemporary radical thinking about sexuality and corporeality and was intended to highlight the assumed disjuncture between Adorno’s work and political praxis. Lee takes as a point of departure the interesting fact that female bodies were deployed as substitutes for the praxis the students were ‘‘reminding’’ Adorno about. students planned a protest. As in the case of his thinking about ‘‘love. is that the body is written in all over Adorno’s work. Similar to Geulen’s critical recovery of the importance of the erotic to Adorno’s work.’’ She shows how Adorno ﬁnds his way through and around the traps of existentialist proclamations of authenticity in love as a model for relations between the individual and the social. We go back to Minima Moralia in Chapter 6. his attention to sentient suffering and his critique of the occlusion of the body from philosophical concern is addressed in several of the chapters that follow. in its most visceral corporeality.’’ what the students were missing. This is in keep-
. Geulen describes how he turns the ‘‘truths’’ of those references against themselves to illuminate the contradictions inherent in the lived condition of ‘‘being woman. His references to erotic experience. While Adorno’s most intimate of reﬂections include some of his most stereotypical references to women. Radical students became ‘‘disenchanted’’ with his apparent scorn for direct action and street politics.’’ Such readings as Geulen’s draw out of a frustrating lack of closure. which causes some readers of Adorno to dismiss him as hopelessly obscure and selfcontradictory. frustrated by his inattention to activism and collective organizing. according to Lee.Introduction
11
Adorno’s theorems—neither those pertaining to art and aesthetic experience or to history and social relations. as Lisa Yun Lee explores Adorno’s thinking about an object associated with intimacy and central to feminist critique. Lee’s thesis identiﬁes the centrality of the body. nor those addressing problems of literary or musical expression—can be sustained at all if their roots in erotic desire are severed. in his writings. Adorno does not offer any systematic comment on the body in Minima Moralia. tell us about his thinking about mimesis in all its complex guises.

Moving from aesthetic to ecological and scientiﬁc deployments of mimesis.12
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
ing with his commitment to the Nietzschean form of aphorism that reﬂects his more general commitment to the practice of philosophy as an unriddling of the object. Ultimately she shows that his concern with the body is related to his concern with the subordinate forms of manual labor and with praxis. Thus attention to the body is best given through immanent critique that exposes its naturalized status and illuminates its position of negativity. Martin explores the multifaceted philosophical life of mimesis. can have repressive/regressive or emancipatory effects. as does Lee. we move from the critical recovery of terms relevant to feminism in Adorno’s work to an exploration of how Adorno contributes to thinking about ongoing ecological crises and coming catastrophes. when we acknowledge that we engage in a necessary process of projection in and through others as we engage in becoming selves. Adorno reminds us. of natural. which reﬂects the more general epistemological status of subject-object relations in traditional philosophy. the movement of subjectivity through others. and of traditional ideas about subject-object relation that one ﬁnds the concern for and about the body in Adorno’s work. Adorno does not try to ﬁll in its absence from Western philosophy but uses the absence of the body as such. as he is aware that simply reversing the mind/body dualism might as readily lead to Fascism as to freedom. sometimes jarringly. he elaborates the distinct possibilities rendered when we acknowledge the mimetic quality of identity. Through metaphor and language that evokes visceral bodily experience. the ﬁrst nested within the second. an argument about Adorno’s thinking on the body. whether those others be of human. of our embodied condition and the dialectical relation between mind and body. This projection. It is in his critique of the modern insistence on the mind/body dualism. The body is philosophy’s negative as in its suffering it signiﬁes philosophy’s failures. He does not reclaim the body in any direct fashion. Martin shows how Adorno’s work can inform a radical feminist ecological project that avoids identitarian effects. Lee shows how these dualisms are related to one another in a complicated fashion. With Bruce Martin’s contribution (Chapter 7). or of aesthetic type. of the division of mental and manual labor. It is only through teasing out the combined and incomplete insights offered that one might put together. the collapsing of subject and object (human and nature) into a totalitarian state
.

She argues that coalitional efforts against increasing levels of violence against women and the egregiously disproportionate rates of incarceration of men of color need intersectionality as a critical concept. It is. at least. it invokes that which is not intelligible yet must be attended to if politics.Introduction
13
of reconciliation. She is more concerned with how pornography creates the conditions in which sexual violence can thrive. instead akin to an aesthetic sensibility. Adorno’s suspicion of the pleasure aroused by the culture industry is not that cultural commodities allow us to escape an untenable reality. in spite of the moral indignation and horror that is expressed at its occurrence. an antiviolence politics. On Han’s reading. Han uses Adorno’s aesthetic theory. from an untimely dismissal by critical race theorists. Adorno values mimesis for its partiality. speciﬁcally references to his appreciation of aesthetic appearances that capture the apparitional quality of the subject as under the spell of the social. we are experiencing pleasure that comes with the freedom from having to think about. while nonetheless providing the subject (who sees or reads or hears the art object) with a corporeal experience of the ‘‘shudder’’ that momentarily. Like the surgery patient. in Han’s reading. Adorno and Horkheimer critique the culture industry for its anesthetic effects on consciousness. They compare it to anesthesia in medicine. ﬁrst introduced by ´ Kimberle Crenshaw in 1991. Patients’ bodies thus experience the pain. it is not. we are not escaping a painful ‘‘reality’’. Han suggests that the criticisms of and efforts to move past intersectionality miss an opportunity to realize its potential as a term of critique necessary to any progressive move against forms of simultaneously racial and gendered violence. a critical retrieval of sorts. and thereby potentially resist. as an inconclusive means to the end of recognition of the nonidentity of self and other. but they know nothing consciously of the pain afterward. intersectionality is not merely a more complicated version of identity politics or an assertion of a space from which truth might be told. Franks is not interested in arguing a causal relationship here. which does not remove the pain itself. Mary Anne Franks turns to Adorno’s assessment of the culture industry’s effects on mass consciousness to think about pornography and sexual violence. but only the memory of it. the untenable conditions of the world. This is the anesthetic effect Franks
. in this case. She is retrieving the concept of intersectionality. breaks the spell. Sora Han’s contribution (Chapter 8) is. is to move forward. However. a static social positioning or an alternative identitarian category of being. instead. Rather. again.

I work through this approach to the knowledge of and representation of objective experience. My concern is with the representation of suffering in an integrative world that erases difference in the interest of managing knowledge and furthering exchange relations. even eradicating. The pornographic anesthetizes our sensibilities about sexual violence by blurring. Women’s suffering has a particularly difﬁcult time becoming intelligible in its own right. not by removing the suffering but by negating active remembrance of it. indeed. if ‘‘fake rape’’ is as ‘‘erotic’’ as ‘‘real rape. It could always be either. as object. Adorno’s negative dialectic challenges the primacy of the subject. given the weight of stereotypical forms of femininity. I argue that feminists must take note of Adorno’s negative dialectics and rather than mourn the impossibility of representing reality as it really is. Traditional philosophy sustains the subject as primary and the object as the subordinate. She uses the liberal arguments about the difference between looking and doing and consent and coercion against themselves. Franks does more than argue that the 12-billion-dollar pornography industry desensitizes us to the suffering other. but an active memory is effectively wiped out by pornography. each of which can explain or make sense of woman’s suffering in noncritical ways. and altered according to the subjective will. In my own chapter (Chapter 10). It anesthetizes consumers to their own suffering and to that of others. make critical use of the distance between material experience and experience as represented in the public world.14
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
claims pornography imposes. and. for a telling of experience that remains aware of how that telling will travel and. as that which is to be known. will in turn become
. Knowing that representations of even the most visceral suffering will be performative may help ward off despair when the world does not respond to the ‘‘reality’’ of suffering. There will always be distance between an experience and the representation of that experience. the boundaries between consensual and coercive sex. viewing the object as the constituent of the subject. mastered. She shows that in viewing pornography the consumer has no way of discerning the difference between a consensual act and an act of rape. One of Adorno’s basic concerns was with ethical self-other relations. We may have a visceral response to hearing about sexual slavery and violence. This makes room for telling stories that do not ‘‘ﬁt’’ with stereotypical notions of femininity and masculinity.’’ then the issue of consent means little in our ethics about sexuality.

rhetoric. Apostolidis is concerned. even act it out. he takes Adorno’s ideas into a space through which Adorno himself would have been unlikely to travel. Apostolidis weaves greeting. rhetoric. In Chapter 11. Apostolidis suggests that Young does not take far enough her own insight into the critical potential of the forms of address she theorizes. and narrative.Introduction
15
constitutive of subjective possibilities. and narrative into his discussion of the meeting. into a meeting between migrant-labor organizers. It may help create a more strategic sense of what we are doing as we represent suffering to the world. Paul Apostolidis is also concerned with ethical self-other relations. He suggests that the reception by listeners
. Whether marginalized groups are such because they use such forms of address or use such forms of address because they are marginalized is not the question. workers. interwoven with a discussion of the ethical challenges involved in organizing and engaging in the event. masculinist forms of address that inherently exclude or marginalize forms of address deployed by historically marginalized persons. with how progressive persons can live with negative dialectics. she leaves them as a kind of preliminary to the ‘‘real’’ doings of deliberative democratic debate. in a world wherein conditions of social inequality will inhibit. In the tradition of feminism and critical theory. showing how deployment of these forms of address can counter the instrumental reason of which the relations of privilege present in the room are an effect. In the meeting he describes. the issue is how to bring them into the conversation in such a way that self-other relations are rendered more receptive and less instrumental. The gender politics of the meeting is made clear in his discussion. or even render more damaging than helpful. and community members in a small town in eastern Washington State. the most well intentioned gestures of solidarity. relatively privileged students and community members come to listen to the experiences of workers in local meatpacking plants and the organizing strategies of union leadership. but that certainly reﬂect and inform feminist activism. Apostolidis regards rational argument and instrumental reason as Western. Apostolidis reads the form and content of the meeting using categories he takes from Iris Young’s Inclusion and Democracy (2000): greeting. Apostolidis advocates the integration of these forms of self-other interactions into the space of public deliberation. as I am. Rather. Pushing Young’s thinking beyond where she goes in her book. Apostolidis is concerned with re-forming democratic interactions according to principles that may not be speciﬁcally feminist.

Zuidervaart does lean toward aesthetic autonomy as the critical gesture. For Zuidervaart. Adorno was attuned to the politics of suffering. The three chapters that follow Apostolidis’s take up Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Adorno is well known for his advocacy of aesthetic autonomy against those who would instrumentalize art toward political ends. but also to Nietzsche’s various admonitions about ressentiment: the will to power of the weak that drives the impulse to hold the strong to account while obscuring the attachment of the weak to their status as victims. Lambert Zuidervaart takes up this debate. it is to the historical conditions and relations of production that Zuidervaart would also look as we think through the critical potential of art. marginalizing and objectifying the embodied and always particular feminine. Zuidervaart outlines how Adorno works through a theory of autonomous art that lives up to Kant’s purposiveness without purpose yet issues its own form of critique. because Adorno only addresses the relationship between art and the state or between art and monopoly capitalism as the measure of its social autonomy. but wishes to broaden its meaning. have held that feminist art must be committed art. ultimately claiming that it is not helpful to argue for or against aesthetic autonomy on its own terms.16
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
can move well beyond that of sympathy to the plight of others to a mutually constitutive interactive relationship. Against Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Adorno held that it is in the very uselessness of art that its potential for critique lies. Apostolidis takes these dynamics into account in rendering an interpretation of the meeting that subverts these relations and creates a different model for unity among differences. the critical move is to avoid colonization by
. They have argued that the disembodied and abstract formalism of modern art reﬂects masculinist values. This critique lives in the dialectical relation between form and substance in the artwork itself and in its relative autonomy from the very capitalist forms that make its existence possible. Zuidervaart argues that Adorno’s sense of aesthetic autonomy is limited. Adorno misses the importance of civil society. Feminist art must be committed to a social agenda. He turns to Adorno’s theory for insight into how feminist art might hold to its legitimate criticisms of the masculinism inherent in most versions of aesthetic autonomy while avoiding absorption and integration into the status quo that Adorno pointed to as the necessary failure of committed art. of voluntarist productions of art and cultural practices. Art must deliberately engage with and challenge masculinist values in the name of transforming gender roles. In Chapter 12. by contrast. Contemporary feminists.

which Kant considers a part of aesthetic judgment. exploring the potential for a critique of suffering in art. to view art. but is constituted dialectically as an effect of that relation. Zuidervaart offers a version of aesthetic autonomy that takes into account more than the internal autonomy advocated by Adorno. Thus. at least in part. their mediations make possible the intelligibility of their experience to the world. He sees potential in nonproﬁt. showing that those who suffer are never expressing the ‘‘truth’’ of their suffering in an unmediated fashion. also looks at the culture industry. would become part of the critical aesthetic experience. but as an aspiration to be struggled for and assessed in historical context. then. Feminists strive to think and speak beyond the constraints that they themselves have so effectively exposed and struggled with. Eagan uses Judith Butler’s work as an exemplar of the contemporary feminist critique of gender as an instantiation of suffering. It is neither pure feeling (pure pain) nor reducible to discursive representation. Rather. The entire aesthetic experience.Introduction
17
corporate and governmental inﬂuence and control. He argues that we should consider a whole range of factors in considering aesthetic value. Eagan then looks to Adorno’s aesthetics for insight into how that suffering might be represented without reiterating the terms of the status quo. cooperative. rendering the reality of it far beyond any terms to which the subject can
. Jennifer Eagan. Eagan seeks to draw connections between Adorno’s theory of suffering and his understanding of culture. It makes a difference. sustain its critique as a potent force and help it resist integration into the culture industry. including its communicability and sociability. from production to engagement with the work of art. Zuidervaart advocates expanding Adorno’s notion of aesthetic autonomy to include consideration of the practices involved in creating and experiencing art. one goes to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan or to the East Side docks. in Chapter 13. or communal forms of production of art that would. Zuidervaart regards aesthetic autonomy not as something to be for or against in the abstract. whether. It would look at alternative spaces in civil society and alternative economies that produce works of art. Importantly. Eagan locates suffering at the intersection of the body and the sociallinguistic order that inscribes meaning onto the experience of that body. Eagan uses concrete examples of how aids and breast cancer are captured in discursive spaces.

the indeterminacy of gender. Rather than resigning herself to a necessary entanglement. what is concealed by the empirical form reality takes. showing their very indeterminacy through that movement. implodes the common sense of gender. Neither Butler nor Adorno offer straightforward means by which to escape the status quo. in Chapter 14. ‘‘Art does not come to know reality by depicting it photographically or ‘perspectivally’ but by expressing. through its autonomous constitution.’’ one wherein Sherman offers no apologies for complicity as she insistently demonstrates. in form and content. Caputi notes that Sherman moves in and out of the stereotypical guises of femininity with ease. seeing it as exemplary of art that. shows how Adorno’s form of materialism allows us to see that there is simultaneously truth and untruth in our identiﬁcations.’’16 Our volume ends with a chapter about identity and difference in thirdwave feminist thought. Mary Caputi.18
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
fully consent. Sherman only gestures toward the possibility of something different from that which we think we know so well. unhampered by the guilt of complicity with the culture industry. Eagan looks to Adorno’s immanent critique of culture and Butler’s theory of nonﬁxed performative identities for an approach to thinking through the conundrums of representing the lived experience of suffering. Sherman exposes that entanglement with each aesthetic gesture of her performance art. accepts Adorno’s challenge with respect to the internal autonomy of the work of art. Third-wave thought is loosely understood here to refer to feminists who are critical of the essentialist tendencies of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Sherman self-consciously deploys as her venue art’s entanglement with the status quo. The value of their work lies primarily in the recognition of the complex relation between any cultural gesture and the reality of suffering. She uses her body and costume and form to perform femininity as a recognizably contingent subject. rather than expressing or explaining. Art here acts as a double agent. Suffering changes the lens through which we view the world and the world shapes possibilities for representing suffering. Sherman’s art works as immanent critique. It works within the stereotypes of femininity to expose the instability of femininity as a category of being. in Chapter 13. Caputi offers an appreciation of what she calls Sherman’s ‘‘staid rebellion. Gillian Howie. Howie explains some distinc-
. We might generally include in this category feminists of color and those who turn to postmodern theory for insight as to identity and difference. She takes up the early performance art of Cindy Sherman.

He stands as a thinker who sustained an absolute commitment to the life of the critical mind. and historical memory. 1984). Robert Hullot-Kentor. Theodor Adorno. She suggests that there are concrete. Feminists struggle with the normative values implicit in any gesture toward identiﬁcation. The chapters that follow keep the faith with Adorno’s attunement to historicity and offer some insight into how we might continue to think about those questions through the prism of his thought. and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press. ‘‘Back to Adorno.
Notes
1. but that the thought of identity should always be suspected of obscuring social interests. 4. Adorno.’’ Telos 81 (1989): 5. and injustice lays some groundwork for asserting or forming groups in a way that challenges rather than afﬁrms or mirrors the status quo. see Martin Jay. 63.Introduction
19
tions between identiﬁcation as a benign cognitive exercise and that which is complicit with social relations of domination. 66. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno. identity. Howie suggests a way in which to identify exploitative interests that are served in grouping women together and that should not be reiterated in progressive movements. Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum. 2 February 1999. For a ﬁne introduction to Adorno’s thinking and some biographical information.’’ New Republic Online. he predicts and speaks directly to many questions that go to the heart of contemporary feminist theory. Her careful delineation of the relationship between identity. ‘‘Professor of Parody. Adorno (Cambridge. 3. 1977). 6. though historically contingent. truths about the nature of group identity. cognition.
. For an attack on Butler’s work that includes the claim that her writing is obscure. However. representation. Negative Dialectics. see Martha Nussbaum. His context is not ours. the relation between theory and practice.
An Inconclusive Conclusion
As a philosopher Adorno had immense integrity. Walter Benjamin.: Harvard University Press. 41. 2. one that works toward the cause of an enlightenment that can bring real freedom. Mass. Susan Buck-Morss. 1987). 5. including questions about interpretation.

see the Selected Bibliography in the present volume. 11. 58. To brieﬂy speculate. trans. 1987).’’ in The Adorno Reader. Theodor Adorno. 1976) and Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Mass. While Adorno was certainly not an activist ﬁgure. 13. For recent readers. Adorno. 8. See Theodor Adorno. When appropriate he worked conscientiously to make his language accessible to a nonspecialized audience of listeners. Jurgen Habermas. In the introduction to a recently published collection of his essays. Origin of Negative Dialectics. Buck-Morss.20
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
7. there are many aspects of Adorno as a public intellectual that have yet to be explored. Origin of Negative Dialectics. 9. 1973). ‘‘The Actuality of Philosophy. 12. 2000). For an excellent review of the inﬂuence Benjamin had on Adorno’s thinking and development of the theory of negative dialectics. Brian O’Connor (London: Blackwell. Theodor Adorno.: MIT Press. 14. Notes to Literature. vol. In short. Frederick Lawrence (Cam¨ bridge. ‘‘Actuality. ed. The Philosophical Discourses of Modernity. 15. it is broadly inaccurate to say that he was uninterested in communicating with the public at large. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press. 227. this may be the result of a difference he understood between listening to complex ideas and reading them with the time to struggle with complexity. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heineman Press. see Buck-Morss. edited collections. even having the sound technicians tell him in their own words what they thought he said in order to measure the comprehension of his ideas and reﬁne his expression. Henry Pickford points out that Adorno participated consistently in radio discussions of contemporary issues in Germany from 1950 until 1969.’’ 32. Negative Dialectics.
. 163. He was intensely involved in educational reforms in Germany in the postwar era. 10. Adorno. and single-author works on Adorno. 1991). 16. 32.

politically committed art. How would you describe the inﬂuences from your lived experience as a feminist activist and intellectual that inspired this trajectory?
Drucilla would like to thank Claudia Leeb for her input on Adorno’s view on such diverse issues as Adorno’s notion of iterability. the culture industry. more recently.
. Each of these issues is addressed throughout the interview. thinking deﬁned in relation to arguments associated with neo-Kantian liberalism. and homosexuality.2
An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
´ Questions by Renee Heberle
RH: Your intellectual trajectory has moved across dialectical and psychoanalytic theory into.

But my activism has also brought to the fore the importance of ideals in day-to-day struggles. ﬁrst. later. Through the struggle for freedom. Undoubtedly it was a certain version of Marxism’s rejection of ideals. often. Gramsci famously writes that the struggle around ideals is crucial to any class struggle. And that all these idealizations are not equal simply because they can be understood as idealizations or as attempts to appeal to an authentic self. An obvious example of these famous ‘‘in union’’ struggles is a scab who breaks rank during a strike. What I am suggesting instead is the example of the scale. speciﬁcally as this was manifested in the Marxist-Leninist groups I was in. there was great skepticism about ideals. for example. but also compelled me to understand them both as aesthetic and ethical reminders of what we were ﬁghting for and not merely against. for larger political agendas. ‘‘Should a Marxist Believe in Rights?’’ a question that I answered in the afﬁrmative. including in my ﬁrst essay. Ethical limits on the political were at the forefront of my writing from its earliest stages. So there is a sense in which I have always been concerned with what remains true about German idealism.22
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
DC: My intellectual history has always been through German idealism. particularly as they normalized the parameters of the political and thus set limits on politics itself. a word that Adorno seems to replace with consciousness. I am aware that Adorno himself would worry that I am authorizing here a certain ‘‘jargon of authenticity. When I became an academic. both for ourselves and. against certain versions of materialism and Marxism and. one that can be as important as any actual political or military confronta-
. particularly the writings of Kant and Hegel. There are dangerous aspects in that struggle. such as. we continuously redeﬁne the meaning of freedom. Its solidarity does indeed risk exclusion if it is based on an ethical ideal. My point was that we must risk those dangers precisely because of the power of ideals. socialism. as this struggle takes place within an ideological battleﬁeld. against certain versions of deconstruction and what has been called postmodernism more generally. and yet at the same time we need to risk solidarity through ideals as a way in which to pull ourselves together in order to struggle for a better world. but the dangers and the awareness of them does not release us from our responsibility. As I have written earlier. that not only led me to see their importance to people in political struggles. even the struggle to be ‘‘in union’’ and to act in solidarity implies an idealized deﬁnition of acting together.’’ But what I am arguing is that we are inescapably caught up in idealizations of ourselves. including ourselves in struggles.

I am not here defending Rawls’s own hypothetical experiment in the imagination. justiﬁcations for ideals always turn us back to the spectrum of deﬁnitions and representations of the ideals themselves. they never actually come to us as empty. but that precisely because we are interpellated by the ideals that we defend—we are as much deﬁned by their deﬁnitions as their deﬁnitions are deﬁned by us. for example. John Rawls’s veil of ignorance. the ideal of perpetual peace.An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
23
tion. we are ﬁghting
. but in the sense of defending. and also that they are vital in any attempt to advocate a position within a given political movement—advocate not in the legal sense. as against the United States’ continuation of its inﬁnite ‘‘war on terror. as an activity that runs against the temporality of the culture industry. Thinkers like Laclau and Mouffe understand the big signiﬁers of freedom and equality to be ultimately empty except as they mark the struggle for hegemony itself. For us as participants in politics. in the course of struggle. and insisting on the slowed-down pace of thinking that goes entirely against the grain of the endless turnover of trend after trend in the culture industry. but are always already ﬁlled in as we struggle over competing ethical and moral justiﬁcations for the direction of those ideals. there is such a place for ideals in political philosophy. I’ve suggested that the big ideals such as freedom be thought of as aesthetic ideas in Kant’s sense. I am defending the idea that. Adorno explicitly addressed the question of whether or not he was resigned in the face of the thoroughgoing colonization of the culture industry by capital. we have no choice but to be activists and. Yet I also believe that at times.’’ At the end of his life. as imagined behind the veil of ignorance. For example. exempliﬁes this attempt to conﬁgure what cannot be conceptualized—the noumenal self. that there are people who are not resigned. Of course in the end. Therefore. ideas that can ﬁgure but not entirely conceptualize the meaning of what is to be signiﬁed by the ideal. whatever one thinks of Rawls’s actual deployment of an aesthetic idea. He argued that as long as there are people who are thinking. which attempts to ﬁgure the free moral subject. defend ideals and different representations of ideals as crucial to the struggle itself. The broad-based coalition we built named United for Peace and Justice—and not United for Hegemonic Victory—in some sense says it all. My addition has been to argue that there is a sense in which ideals are never able to be known simply through their demarcation as signs of an ideological battleﬁeld. the noumenal self. I agree with him here that thinking itself is a disruptive activity.

by bringing the administrative apparatus of the pornography industry into view. where I write that there is much greater space for representational politics in the two senses in which I deﬁne it there: in actual struggles (for example.’’ as he says in Negative Dialectics. most of Candida Royale’s ﬁlms are about the ideal of love.24
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
for a hegemonic victory against the reigning administration of the United States. ideals actually matter. for example. for porn workers to represent themselves in a union [see below]) and in ﬁnding new ways to represent both our relationships with one another and the ideals through which we imagine them. The administered society allows for no ‘‘peeping out. But my point is that we can only engage in that struggle on an ideological battleﬁeld that implicates us all in the struggle for or against ideals. I refuse all forms of what I see as a form of historical reductionism. actually frees herself from her reduction to an administered object and opens our eyes to what that apparatus is in the ﬁrst place. Adorno and I part ways in my defense of ideality. as they give form not only to our politics. For me. our disagreement over ideality takes us back to the ﬁrst question. After all. we are also reshaping the very apparatus of administration. you defended the importance of ideality against the notion that ideals are empty of content. in her sex education ﬁlms. It is not just that I think there is space for peeping out of the administered society. How would you describe the defense of ideality that you ﬁnd in Adorno? What is the signiﬁcance for feminism? DC: Actually. where an ideal can be completely reduced in meaning to the determination imposed upon it by its historical locale. In a recent essay that draws on Adorno’s reading of Kant.
. in our resistance to it. emergent from a struggle for hegemony ultimately driven by power and violence. RH: Adorno is most often understood as being radically pessimistic with respect to the potential for resistance and certainly with respect to social transformation. Remember. because those ideals had been so captured by the culture industry that they had been drained of anything like a critical edge. Just to make clear what I’m trying to say: remember that Ona Zee [see below]. And as political actors we are not simply manipulators of political ideals. It is that. that the war in Iraq was ultimately called Operation Iraqi Freedom. So in the end. Adorno became very suspicious of the possibility of immanent critique’s relying on the great ideals of the bourgeois Western revolutions.

For Adorno there is a profound sense in which the culture industry results in something close to the liquidation of individuality. We are offered
. As we are consumed by the products that we are supposedly simply consuming. but this manipulation shows the power of the ideal over people’s imaginations. it does so by taking away the very space I’m seeking to protect in the imaginary domain. can be manipulated in part because they continue to mean something to people. it had to be sold through the ideal of freedom. we lose any identity other than that of the consumer. both in the sense that they actually have signiﬁcance. and so forth. for example. where people have understandings of them. The struggle over ideals and the meaning of ideals can become important if you take Adorno at his word that cynicism is the ideology of advanced capitalism. But this importantly is a consumer who is unaware that what is operating here is not choice but rather a produced set of images that have taken over our ability to distance ourselves from the aspirations to live up to some ideal as advertised on television. The dynamics of the former are ultimately coercive.An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
25
but to who we imagine ourselves to be. Cynicism in the sense that all ideals are simply manipulations. Almost every magazine targeted at women bombards us with new remedies for weight loss. which assumes the vulnerability of individuality that Adorno consistently returns us to. can dangerously play into what Adorno himself saw as the profound ideological danger of a neoliberalism that assumes that all idealists are in the end nothing but self-interested utility maximizers dressing up their self-interest so as to sell their product. in other words. Ideals. In order for the war to be ‘‘sold’’ to the public. The ideal of freedom was and continues to be clearly manipulated in the Iraq war. RH: The texture of the relationship between law and the possibilities of individuality is different from that between the culture industry and individuality. how? DC: The ideal of the imaginary domain as both a moral and a legal right is justiﬁed in the name of protecting the space for individuation. then. and in the sense that they have signiﬁcance to people who believe in them as part of their both personal and national identity as citizens of the United States. all so that we may perhaps acquire a purportedly sexual body for men. In a sense. new tonics and toners to reverse the aging process. Is the protection of the imaginary domain from and through the law signiﬁcant in the context of the culture industry? If so. while the dynamics of the latter are persuasive.

It is clear in such statements that he considers women to be prey to the masquerade that is femininity and therefore easily seduced by the culture industry. Adorno goes beyond the critique that our preferences are shaped. as we so often read. rendering us unable to stand up in any meaningful way to assert ourselves as our own persons. This unconscious sexism.26
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
thousands of kinds of hair dye. It could be interpreted that I think that it is women who are more easily consumed by the culture industry. ‘‘the fetish character of the commodity lays claim to actual people. The imaginary domain has as its political justiﬁcation the need to protect as a matter of right the very spaces in which we are able to imagine ourselves beyond this unconscious antagonism between women and personhood. as an ideal is to elaborate that this connection between woman and personhood must be given space even as it is recognized psy-
. leading him to use women as examples of the beings who have had their individuality completely eclipsed. Part of its work. of course premised on the assumption that no one wants to go gray. dating after ﬁfty. Adorno often insinuates that women seemingly are more easily manipulated than men. Note that in the examples I have just given. But at the same time. Adorno reﬂects unconscious assumptions about the antagonism between feminine sexual difference and personhood. which can be quite fetching. he talks about how women are enticed to get suntans. individuality and masculinity. or on the other hand whether we have been eaten up by the distorted desire to maintain the youthful image necessary for. For example. I have mainly been writing about women. to make the much stronger point that it is we who are pounded into a being and as a result have lost the ability to distance ourselves from the bombardment of images that promotes the endless push to consume more and different products. Adorno forces us to questions whether those who dye their hair really chose to do so. of more importance than the boy-friend it was perhaps supposed to entice. if you will. is not necessary for his argument. The idea that a girl is more erotically attractive because of her brown skin is probably only another rationalization.’’ Adorno muses. The sun-tan is an end in itself. It is not merely a coincidence that almost all his metaphors for the effective undermining of individuality are related to feminization. on a very deep level. however. it shows that Adorno tends to associate.’’1 Adorno frequently refers to women being much more vulnerable to their own fetishization than men. they themselves become fetishes. ‘‘In the sun-tan.

or how she herself is to be produced as the thing that has to match the expectations that the culture industry promotes as both the subject and object of its purpose—proﬁt and consumption. I strongly defended the reasonableness of those women jurors and tried to bring attention to the one book about the trial that did not become a best seller. whether in the form of art objects of culture. The managed artist. for example. in all too many circumstances. I am arguing that legal rights can play an important role in protecting the moral space needed by us to reimagine our personhood. you might say that the constitution of personhood is itself left open to more possibilities if the imaginary domain is protected. Culture becomes one industry like any other under capitalism. Simpson trial fantasies about race and particularly sex between a black man and a white woman is part of the ‘‘attraction. as if it were a pregiven attribute or aspect of every individual. Certainly law is a coercive system by deﬁnition. actually constitutes the conditions and possibilities of the person rather than simply recognizing it. Law itself has only too clearly become a part of the culture industry. J. than if it is not. and I take seriously all the critiques of a feminism that turns itself over to a state protection to answer feminist aspirations to liberation and freedom. as we have seen in the spectacles of legal trials—who can forget the O. But on the other hand. then.’’ Of course in the O. In this way. and this is of course following a Hegelian insight. RH: Does Adorno’s thinking about the culture industry ring true for you.An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
27
choanalytically as a struggle that can only be carried out over a lifetime. is only able to produce commodities. or is your reading.’’ That black women function as the unimaginable shows the effectiveness of the culture industry in producing a thoroughly racialized view of women and sexuality. has no say in either what she produces as her art. Simpson ‘‘affair. a right such as the imaginary domain. of the culture and business of pornography and its role/effect/purpose quite different from what he might say? DC: What rings true for me in Adorno’s analysis is that the notion of the artist as a critic of the homogenization imposed by advanced capitalism has now been replaced by the managed artist. The culture industry.2 Adorno can certainly help us understand whose book becomes a best seller and why law can indeed function as an important weapon against the production of legal trials as a TV attraction. or in the form of the produced stars who
. J. driven solely by proﬁt. and ourselves as sexuate beings who can be persons.

Adorno does not speak to the speciﬁc production of a tamed feminine sexuality. As such. that as long as we keep on thinking. but certainly the projection of an artist consumed by her own produced image is thoroughly Adornian.’’ he writes that the experiment would take the form of having two groups. I chose to keep answering the question. I say ‘‘has been’’ because the pornography industry itself. have now reached the pinnacle of their degradation. but also of a thoroughgoing and tamed heterosexual message in the form of her songs. The managed rock star is a classic example of what Adorno is speaking about. particularly teenage female sexuality. As I answer this question. and to tune into Internet images of two teenagers having sex. if one means by the industry the production of pornographic videos. In the place of dreams and fantasies.28
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
are controlled by the very objects they put into circulation—their art. and the music itself. and her lack of a voice becomes a metaphor for the way all of us are silenced by an industry that seeks to promote a thoroughgoing commodiﬁcation of what used to be associated with creativity and the imagination. though. What Adorno seems to understand as pornography. All aspects of her life are managed and controlled. And this may be why I still agree with Adorno. I’ve already been invited to enlarge the penis I do not have. She in a sense portrays managed femininity. but Adorno’s point is that the management of the production of Brittany Spears is not only the production of a certain kind of female sexuality.
. has been negatively affected by the pervasiveness of Internet pornography. is neither the Internet nor the video industry. sex. Indeed when he speaks of examining the possibility of negative effects of pornography on young people in ‘‘Sexual Taboos and Justice Today. the alienated. including often the voice. which at least traditionally was thought of as contact. frightened individuals. is now carried out through the very lack of touching. It is a commonplace joke that Brittany Spears cannot sing. for the production of an image that sells along with its product. since pornography has been a big business in the United States. but rather pornographic books. who Adorno sees as the victims of advanced capitalism. we have the safety of a form of sex that demands nothing of us in the way of imagination. Internet pornography might well be for Adorno the absolute epitome of how advanced capitalism completely inverts the meaning of human contact. we are not completely resigned to our alienated condition. It would seem that the mass production of pornographic videos would certainly ﬁt into Adorno’s searing critique of the culture industry.

desirable because they are despised. prostitutes are both tolerated and hated because they represent the false pleasure of bought sex and legal persecution of prostitution will always be ineffective because the false pleasure it represents is the only kind of pleasure left open in a world where sexuality is simply one commodity among others. precisely because they are the space for violation. For MacKinnon. The violence enacted on women is crucial to the presentation of women and women’s bodies as desirable.3 Adorno defends pornography. I have argued. Feminist critics of the pornography industry have argued that the stereotypical and deadly repetitive scenes of heterosexuality displayed in pornography announce the death of sexual passion.An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
29
only one of which reads pornographic books. MacKinnon’s analysis of pornography shares many insights of Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry. particularly in matters of heterosexual love. For Adorno. it is violence against women. The maternal body can only be remembered as always already in pieces. is now taken on the screen in the stereotypical scenes of the porn ﬁlm and thus turned into the material of the pornographic ﬁlm itself. For someone like Catherine MacKinnon. Thus for her. which Adorno attributes to the lingering sexual taboos in Germany. that the dismembered feminine body often displayed in pornographic ﬁlms is a safe object that saves men from having to come to terms with their fear of the maternal body. But the billion-dollar industry of video production with its endless display of stereotypical heterosexual scenes of male violence actually comes quite close to one of the most damaging effects Adorno associates with television—the reduction of human activity to deadly repetition. According to MacKinnon. as giving pleasure to adults. this is not merely the representation of violence against women. and its regulation as an interference with personal freedom. pornography actually produces the ﬁnal word on who and how we can be. understood as books. this commodiﬁcation of women as violent objects is the truth of women. but also that the women in porno ﬁlms are depicted as both desirable and despicable. following insights of Jacques Lacan. as women. no woman who was her own person could consent to her reduction to what she aptly refers to as the ‘‘fuckee. Or perhaps more accurately. Here she echoes Adorno’s
. In one very literal sense a porn worker is a prostitute because she has actual sex in exchange for money. This ambivalence toward prostitutes. so that the horrifying ﬁgure of the phallic mother cannot rise against the man and suck away his individuality.’’ Interestingly enough.

the possibility of the re-representation of the scene of pornography. Ona Zee sought to organize women and men porn workers into a union. when I defend the possibility for something like a re-representation of the scene of pornography. In Sex Academy. second. even as managed performance. Ona Zee uses that material itself to remind us that these are real women with real
. that shifts the meaning of the scene itself. believe. and MacKinnon. is ultimately too encompassing. creates a deadly circle in which what is produced for consumption actually consumes those for whom the objects are produced. Ona Zee not only tried to show that porn workers were workers who indeed could be in the subject position. repetitive scenes of traditional pornography. Thus. for me. been consumed by the culture we once might have been thought to create. notwithstanding the ultimate collapse of her union because of a lack of any meaningful political or legal support. I understand this possibility in two senses: ﬁrst. in the deepest and most profound sense. and indeed a new representational politics. She had great success with her efforts. The ﬁrst ten minutes of Sex Academy would have you believe it to be a traditional porn ﬁlm. his argument. or dream. Ona Zee steps in and out of her role in the ﬁlm. through Adorno we cannot defend. In the 1990s. as representation in terms of the unionization of its workers. as I have. showing how women porn workers manage to keep working throughout the month. There lies the possibility of a new representational space. Still. Pornography. leaves something like the freedom of what Jacques Derrida would call iterability. like the culture industry. But I disagree with Adorno. But then she breaks from the sex act to tell you that she has her period. we have. in any repetition there can always be difference. Although Adorno provides deep insight into understanding the loss of the space and creativity of imagination in culture. but also sought to break up the stereotypical. in terms of a re-presentation of sex and gender that challenges prevailing stereotypes of femininity and. there is very little space left for the productive imagination to grapple with the constraints on the representational ﬁeld that is pushed on us as all we can see. Using techniques she explicitly associated with Brecht. Ona Zee after all is having sex with a much younger man. proceeding to show in graphic detail what a woman has to wear in order to keep working during her period. but are produced as its objects. For Adorno. the necessity for repetition. The period becomes the material that a traditional pornography movie cannot represent.30
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
insight that we no longer create culture. To be fair to Adorno.

As Learning the Ropes teaches us. such as hanging up pots and pans for ﬂexible kitchen organization. a body that is able to represent its own pleasure as a whole woman rather than as the feared and despised sex. Indeed. Adorno would have
. She concludes by calling for double time for women who are working during their period. As I argue in The Imaginary Domain (1995). working-class people. is one that we need to keep open to rework even the repressed materials of the imaginary. who by the way is the Meryl Streep of the porn industry. with desires for domination and submission. not only directly uses alienation effects to show how the ﬁlms are produced. Her representational politics then implies both a representation of workers and an opening up of new spaces for the representation of sexuality. In her ﬁlms Ona Zee. we should never actually use ropes in sadomasochistic sex because ropes can in fact hurt people. More strongly put. aspires to actually free people to be able to explore their sexuality by removing some of the taboos against playing. as a moral and psychic space. which is only a hole. Ona Zee.An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
31
bodies and that this is indeed difﬁcult labor. and for her it should always be playing. Candida Royale—have sought to do the same. a six-hour sex education ﬁlm. which allows for a reimagining of a feminine body. these pornographers seek to rework some aspects of a feminine imaginary. it is one that requires us to promote and support both forms of these representational politics in the pornography industry. Other ‘‘femme’’ pornographers—for example. The ideal of the imaginary domain. he would perhaps have even condemned it as dangerously implying that we can work the culture industry almost as much as it can work us. She indeed inserts breaks into the ﬁlm to show how one can use these bands for household purposes. But her hope is that these videos actually open the space for forbidden fantasies and free up desires from the deadly repetition she associates with some of the more boring pornography ﬁlms. Ona Zee instead uses ﬂexible elastic bands that can be adjusted to the size of the person and that can actually be used for other purposes than sadomasochistic sex. making her argument rather forcefully by demonstrating just how arduous sex is then. In the ﬁlm. Adorno would be unlikely to think of the possibility of such representational politics as feasible. is about sadomasochistic sex for poor. Her ﬁlm Learning the Ropes. with her husband. in order to appear on ﬁlm. She also tries to help people develop ways of engaging their own sexuality so as to free them from the constraints of the stereotypical scene of pornography—which she does in part by refusing to have plastic surgery and hide her age.

unclear. An ideal like the imaginary domain ultimately turns on a faith in the reproductive and productive imagination that goes beyond what Adorno indicates as possible under the conditions of the culture industry. Adorno’s critique of Brecht could clearly apply to Ona Zee’s porn ﬁlms. because they can control them. the deformation of the imagination is a key effect of the culture industry. I further argue that it is not only in iterability that we can ﬁnd freedom. For Adorno. a change of attitude. for example.32
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
been highly critical of Ona Zee’s politically committed ﬁlms. When represented as managed. He also most likely would have been skeptical of the very idea of the porn worker as a subject. For Adorno. Think. but it is the paradox that the material of our sex is never reducible to anyone’s fantasies of what it is because it is there for us as something we live with even if as we join with Ona Zee in demanding ever greater spaces for ‘‘it’’—representation. rather than compel. then. Thus. but gynecology. The imagination itself. plays such as Mother Courage can only demand. the one who is asking on her knees. The porn industry sought to repress Ona Zee’s ﬁlms because it was not pornography. Remember Ona Zee’s graphic demonstration of how a woman has to work the material of her period in order to stay at work in a porn movie. Ona Zee is explicitly following Brecht in her alienation procedures but she is also doing it with a state of political purpose in mind. that is. Such a demand and such a position is hardly the one that Adorno associates with great works of art. That paradox is that the feminine sex in pornography is always depicted as simply there for her manipulation by others and yet the materiality of our bodies is for us always different from that fantasy. although in Minima Moralia he writes eloquently about how women’s bodies are circulated in a representational ﬁeld so as to give men. This demand not only can remain unheard. feminine sexuality is already being represented through the fantasy of a
. Although I accept aspects of his critique. can never be completely encompassed by the culture industry because of the paradox that feminine sexuality itself represents. of Adorno’s engagement with Brecht. the illusion of control and empowerment. the danger of articulating an ideal such as the imaginary domain can seem to go against the profound necessity of remaining true to a relentless critique of how the imagination has been deformed. but worship puts the politically committed artist in the position of the supply cart. particularly what I have called the feminine imaginary. sick. let alone as a subject of her own sexuality. which refuse an accommodation to the culture industry. or unsexy.

An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
33
controlled woman. it is the phantasmic dimension of sex and of feminine sexual difference that prevents it from ever being effectively turned once and for all into a tool for the culture industry. so as to show what cannot be imagined within the constraints imposed upon the industry. particularly with reference to sexuality and sexual taboos. For Adorno the lingering sexual taboos in Germany predispose especially homosexuals to totalitarianism because they are eaten up by sexual fantasies they aim to get rid of by projecting them onto out-groups. To be fair to Adorno. For him. In the end. What might feminists do with this aspect of his work? Is it superceded by the sophistication of feminist appropriations of Freudian and Lacanian theory? Or do you ﬁnd anything in it that is particularly helpful for feminist theory and politics? DC: Adorno offers us an interesting analysis of the continuing use and manipulation of sexual taboos in modern society—a society in which more and more of those taboos seem to have been lifted. Adorno does rely on some notion of a societal un/ subconscious to articulate some of the contradictions and aporias of latemodern experience. they challenge the idea that the imagination can ever be completely caught up by the culture industry. feminist pornography becomes an interesting example of a cultural product working through the conditions of its own production. RH: Though I do not ﬁnd him ever ﬁnally deﬁning its terms. That very demonstration indicates an imagination that goes beyond those constraints. one who is absolutely knowable as object. but rather discursively developing the reader’s notion of it through the style and content of his prose. The two forms of representational politics that I describe in the porn industry explicitly stage the inadequacy of the dismembered woman’s body to the woman herself in different ways. However. because that only further blocks the ‘‘homosexual’’ from having any pos-
. but is one that leads to dangerously extreme sexual fantasies. We have much we can still learn from Adorno about how sexual taboos are used and how they continue to operate in such a society. fantasies that some psychoanalytic schools might base on an overidentiﬁcation with and incomplete separation from the mother. argues that homosexuality should not be legally repressed. In this way. he. the problem with Adorno is that for him there is some sense to the taboo against homosexuality. at least in one article. homosexuality is not a mature form of sexuality. By so doing.

Adorno’s dialectic of natural history reminds us that neither history nor nature can be turned into a ﬁrst principle. has been the subject of recent debates in feminist theory and politics.34
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
sibility of achieving something like maturity. Thus suffering and its remembrance are central to his sense of how we might live ethically in the post-Holocaust world.’’4 Suffering in Adorno is not merely recognized as historical or natural necessity.’’ he notes. In this way I would claim Adorno an ally of the imaginary domain. RH: The politics of representation with respect to suffering. which of course paradoxically shows us the importance of his understanding of sexual taboos. We should note that Adorno does not speak of lesbians. then it only offers a solution. because a ‘‘homosexual’’ by deﬁnition. could not even be imagined by Adorno. with the epigraph ‘‘The need to let suffering speak is the condition of all truth. or if it were possible to comprehend nature as historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature. for Adorno. To quote Adorno. this overidentiﬁcation with the mother has positive consequences for Adorno. Can you share your thoughts about the representation of and the place of the suffering subject in politics? DC: I opened my ﬁrst essay on Adorno. as natural being. But interestingly enough. most particularly sexual suffering. as the subject of her own sexuality. The Holocaust constitutes a deﬁning event/moment for Adorno’s thinking. where it is most historical. they block the range of the imagination. They are simply erased in his discussion of homosexuality. It will always only be ‘‘something like’’ maturity. ‘‘If the question of the relation of nature and history is to be seriously posed. rather. It is as if the lesbian. suffering. The only answer adequate to
. the taboo on lesbianism runs so deep that he himself could not allow it to come into his view. has not achieved mature sexuality. Wendy Brown’s articulation of the issue uses Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment to develop a critique of what she sees as a dangerous strain of moralistic reaction deﬁning the terms on which feminists think they should engage politically. from the standpoint of the particular who endures it. is senseless. we need to put Adorno’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s ethics of pity within the materialism or indeed the centralism of Adorno’s philosophy of redemption.’’ As I wrote there. You might say that for Adorno. so many gay men are ‘‘smart. in Philosophy of the Limit. if it is possible to comprehend historic being in its most extreme historical determinacy.

but rewrites it by trying to keep the rift between the physical and the meaning that has been given in Hegel’s second nature so that that physical and the suffering with it is not encircled in an immanence that defends itself paradoxically against the promise of happiness. to remember ourselves as the suffering physical is to hold on to the physical moment within ourselves. Adorno does not entirely reject reconciliation. In Adorno’s words: ‘‘The telos of such an organization of society would be to negate the physical suffering of even the least of its members. Adorno is rebelling against Hegel’s attempt to give a philosophical meaning to the suffering of actual human beings in history. the promise of happiness that the desiring individual has been denied. and they negate the internal unreﬂexive forms of that suffering. Adorno’s main target here is Hegel. whose philosophy of reconciliation attempted to come full circle and reconcile the dichotomies that seem inevitable in modernity. Adorno’s materialism as deployed in his nonidentity thinking carries within it a profound refusal of the continual denial of happiness that is demanded. The reminder that we too are the suffering physical is simultaneously expressed in both a destructive moment and a contrary moment that promises hope. Adorno was rebelling against Hegel’s speciﬁc conceptualization of reconciliation as a particular kind of naturalized history in which who and what humanity is and has undergone is ultimately given meaning through its incorporation into a totality famously known as Geist. Put somewhat differently. for Adorno the suffering physical demands its own redemp-
. But the contrary moment in the reminder of the suffering physical is that the vulnerability points beyond the very conceptual schemes that seek to give meaning to the unhappiness. not a new version of the meaning of what has been undergone.’’5 The dialectic of natural history for Adorno not only serves to expose the hardening of social formations into a ‘‘second nature’’. By identity logical thinking. The feeling of vulnerability can push us further to the identity logical thinking that seeks to control the other by appropriating it to an idea or conceptual schema adequate to its full description. the dialectic also potentially returns us to what has been forgotten within ourselves—our own physicality and vulnerability. For Adorno. In this sense. Adorno means the attempt to conﬂate subject and object through the attempt to conceptualize their identity. and with it the goal of our longing—sensual ease. The last thing Adorno seeks to do is to reconcile human beings with their suffering by making it ‘‘make sense.An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
35
the suffering physical is the end to suffering.’’ This is what Adorno thought of as the antispiritual side of spirit.

36
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
tion in a reconciled world. at the same time. between how we understand and describe what the world is like for women and the political struggles of feminists? DC: Adorno’s relentless critique of historicist and reductionist thinking as a form of identity logic could not be more relevant here. Suffering. We need to break out of the ways that we have both deﬁned and given meaning to the suffering and. Compassion for Adorno is not rooted in. our grasp of our existence as the suffering physical. deny the full weight and brutality that bears down on all of us that would seek a world in which we didn’t take enormous deprivation as the condition of humanity. For example. a world in which sensual ease is not blocked by the striving to control a world of both nature and culture so as to avoid confronting its own vulnerability. As he writes. Schopenhauer’s wisdom of disillusionment. for example. MacKinnon
. We ﬁnd truth in tenderness for the subject’s reﬂection on his or her own otherness. The materialist in Adorno honors the pledge to otherness by its adherence to suffering.’’ The longing of the suffering physical is to be protected as a sign of what might be. His reading of Hegel’s historical idealism leaves out its relentless attempt to capture historical truth as the ultimate meaning of humanity. he seeks to ‘‘read transcendence longingly rather than strike it out.’’6 This ‘‘grief’’ is not meant to hold on to any meaning that registers as a form of address or appeal that seeks to preserve the wounded attachment through an underlying asserted identity of the attachment and the suffering. then. RH: Feminists have struggled with how certain articulations of what the world is like for women constrain and circumscribe involvement and or possibilities of feminist politics. To deny a physicality is to deny a kind of suffering. speaks against meaning. Catharine MacKinnon’s articulation of the present condition of woman as ‘‘the walking embodiment of male desire’’ seems to leave no space for differences to matter among women as they engage in politics. allows us to be soft. In some sense. To consciously understand oneself as a ‘‘natural’’ suffering being is to retrieve a kind of innocence. but in the recognition of the shared human plight that comes from the subject’s shared reﬂection of her ‘‘natural side. As Adorno writes. of what I call Adorno’s utopia of sensual ease. ‘‘What would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is. as you see it through your reading of Adorno and Kant. the opposite is the case. Could you reﬂect on the relationship.’’ The mindfulness of nature. but Adorno means this in a very speciﬁc sense.

We argued that Adorno potentially shows us that the concept of gender can never be adequate to its masculine subject or its feminine object and that this ‘‘inadequacy’’ can alternatively never be captured within the repostulation of the feminine within sexual difference. they are caught in a regress that ultimately leads them to an intuition of space and time upon which all concepts are ultimately based.An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
37
is ultimately a positivist in exactly the sense that Adorno spent a lifetime demonstrating as itself a form of a hierarchical. for example. as it is itself the mark of this inadequacy. In other words. as. Adorno’s nonidentity logical thinking proceeds from two seemingly opposite points of departure. Adorno is following Kant in a very speciﬁc sense here. in fantasy at least. patriarchal way of comprehending reality. Adorno shows us that this contamination is always an excess beyond the conﬁnes of a categorically gendered subject. so that the masculine is in no way contaminated in its assertion of supremacy by the very otherness it seeks to suppress. we argued that Adorno actually broke up the attempt to reduce woman to a paradoxically unknowable position. instrumental reason fails at the very moment it asserts itself as having fully grasped the world it encounters. The I of the feminine subject may cling to the subversive power of the negative that disrupts the categorical deﬁnition of feminine sexual difference. What one runs up against is exactly the concept as other to what it seeks to understand. it proceeds from the otherness that itself reminds us that what is natural or physical. reality is only graspable through a complex set of deductions that in the end take us back to an acknowledgment of the ﬁnitude of reason—ﬁnitude understood as Kant’s recognition that reason itself is always limited by the transcendental imagination that makes it possible. Lacan argued that women are beyond the symbolic order because they are the embodiment. Thus. the transcendental imagination. is never just a concept. an essay I wrote with my colleague and former student Adam Thurschwell. Second. from the quasi-Kantian recognition that we never simply think beyond our concepts and therefore our concepts themselves are always limited by what is other to them. Jacques Lacan does. of what is the lingering remnant of a presymbolized subject. and yet at the same time does not position woman as the Negative as Lacan does. the otherness we confront. For Adorno. When human beings conceptualize their world.
. In one of my earlier essays on Adorno and feminism. Famously. First. Now MacKinnon has to assume a one-way relationality between the masculine and the feminine. we never get to simple reality in Kant.

can actually operate against that utopian impulse. the less it objectiﬁes itself as Utopia—a further form of regression—whereby it sabotages its own realization. Its insatiable quality. Adorno defended the idea that there is a utopian impulse in thinking itself and. must assert itself against Adorno’s relentless attempt to show that any claims to the positive truth about who we are as men and women ultimately falls prey to the identitarian logic that unravels at the moment that it asserts itself against that which it seeks to and yet ultimately cannot control. Reiﬁed gender differentiation. who neither superscribes his conscience nor permits himself to be terrorized into action. thinking is not the spiritual reproduction of that which exists. We need to step back and allow for a slowed-down pace of thinking in order to estrange our world and see what is all too familiar as unheimlich in order to keep in touch with what is speeded up by the culture industry. Furthermore. For its part. I deeply agree with Adorno on the relationship between thought and critical distance. She is only there for man as the boundary and the limit to conﬁrm his identity. rejects the foolish wisdom of resignation. because it is important for feminism’s relationship between theory and practice: ‘‘[T]he uncompromisingly critical thinker. such thinking takes a position as a ﬁguration of praxis which is more closely related to a praxis truly involved in change than in a position of mere obedience for the sake of praxis. Feminists have struggled with tensions between what we might loosely call academic or scholarly feminism and activist or street feminism. pseudoactivity. Open thinking points beyond itself. As long as thinking is not interrupted. including activism.38
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
Both Lacan and MacKinnon at the end deﬁne woman as the one with nothing to say. RH: In Minima Moralia and elsewhere. Adorno expresses concern for the role of the intellectual. then. I have been at many conferences in which the tension between those committed to ‘‘theory’’ and those committed to ‘‘practice’’ reached such a point
.’’7 Here Adorno reminds us of the central lesson of Negative Dialectics. at times. I want to quote Adorno on this point. Would you please reﬂect on how you view this relationship and how Adorno’s insights contribute to your thinking? DC: At the end of his life. is in truth the one who does not give up. The Utopian impulse of thinking is all the stronger. the resistance against petty satiety. it has a ﬁrm grasp upon possibility. and this means that within feminism we should never demand that all thinking have an immediate practical application.

that have stemmed from the inﬁnite ‘‘war on terror. In the end. Perhaps one of the demands that has grown out of the union movement of adjuncts and graduate students is that they be given the time and money to think. Let me be clear: I do think that there is an important place for theory that is practical and that takes up the position of advocacy—I have for example. But I am also arguing that not all philosophy or thinking need. If we were to recast the debate within the academy between theory and practice as being about a struggle against elitism and class hierarchies within the university then we would get to what is truly at stake in so much of the debate between so-called feminist theorists and feminist activists. Many universities in the United States have up to one-half of their teaching staff in the position of adjunct faculty—adjuncts who work long hours. ﬁnd only one validation for itself. But in the end
. or lack thereof. sometimes we have no choice but to put down our books and risk getting our hands dirty in the deepest sense with activist politics. defended the imaginary domain as both a legal and moral right. But this would mean that the right to think and the kind of support that thinking demands.An Interview with Drucilla Cornell
39
of heat and dispute and regrettable name-calling that a debate over what was really at stake was impossible. there is no simple reality in which theorists have the fancy position and the activists do not. while those who are the ‘‘activists’’ are either implicitly or explicitly questioning feminist identiﬁcations with elite positions at elite universities.’’ are often associated with fancy positions at fancy universities. I have been an activist all my life and in recent years formed an organization called ‘‘Take Back the Future’’ to struggle against the politics. that it advocates a speciﬁc program of reform. since those who are labeled the ‘‘theorists.’’ I think there are times in which we are called on to take our place in the streets and that we cannot be somehow excused from that responsibility. In other words. of course. we have to either accept that responsibility or turn from it. Do many of us try to be both? Of course. keep up with unbelievably demanding teaching schedules and receive little pay and no beneﬁts. but we cannot at the end escape from it altogether. that is. But what I would like to further suggest here is that what has torn apart so many feminist conferences has to do with an elitism that is inseparable from the way in which class plays out in the university itself. be much more equally distributed in the university than it is now. from ﬁnancial assistance to light teaching loads. When the country in which we live engages in an illegitimate war. even in trying times like our own. Is there place in the world for both? Of course.

Theodor Adorno. Cornell. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press. 17.. ‘‘Sexual Taboos and Justice Today. 26. and Spectacle in the O.’’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Jephcott (London: Verso. eds. Cited in Drucilla Cornell. Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from a Damaged Life.40
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
the temptation to ﬁt in and indeed be patted on the head for appearing smart to those in power is harder to resist than many of us had thought. It performs this task ex ofﬁcio. Philosophy of the Limit. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press. 2.
.’’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. E. 170. 5. J. F. Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze. Theodor Adorno. because they do not want to play the game. Theodor Adorno. under contract. ‘‘Free Time. 1997). Philosophy of the Limit. under contract. 1990). which causes us to reﬂect on our position as professionals in the academy: ‘‘The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex ofﬁcio. 8. 1993). in order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live. N. trans. Script. 1990). Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press. 7. The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge.’’ reprinted in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. 3. Theodor Adorno. 26. trans. trans. 6. 1990).’’8
Notes
1. ‘‘Resignation. Simpson Case (New York: Pantheon. Cornell. 4. Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky Lacour. Perhaps we can end with an important reminder of Adorno. 21. Thus. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates the division of labour—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. and those who could live otherwise are kept out. 1985). trans.

So domesticated is Odysseus’s wander-
. his voyage an extended business trip. Odysseus himself would be the quintessential ﬁgure of homo oeconomicus. his passions the usual affairs men fall into when they have a devoted wife at home.3
Adorno’s Siren Song
Rebecca Comay
Excursus on an Excursus
In a lengthy ‘‘excursus’’ or appendix to the ﬁrst chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment—a detour in a book which constitutes itself essentially as an extended patchwork of such appendages—Adorno reads Homer’s Odyssey as an allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment.

such a strategy would institutionalize the upright posture as the posture of domination.42
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
lust. But if Odysseus could afford to succumb. What if the Odyssey chapter. this is in turn inseparable from a self-domination which becomes self-mutilation at its extreme. even Nausicaa. Always one to cut his losses. Expressed in the physical distance between Odysseus above (inert but ‘‘sensitive’’) and the sailors below (deaf but active) is the founding opposition between intellectual and manual labor on which class society as such depends. in her own fashion. In the face of the Sirens’ singing—a voice of nature. this time he has to keep a grip. senses dulled by the brutalizing boredom of wage labor. far from being an episode contained within the larger economy of the work. strong arms. a voice of pleasure. provisionally. that Adorno indeed reads the ancient epic as a modern novel. taking cautious pleasure in ‘‘art’’ as an idle luxury to be enjoyed at safe remove. Reason becomes unreason when pushed to its conclusion: the attempt to free oneself from external bondage to the Other unleashes an endless ritual of sado-masochistic bondage games in which the subject has himself tied up tight. If reason can only assert itself as the domination of an alien nature. The Sirens are not the ﬁrst or last women to try to seduce Odysseus. Circe. Odysseus strapped to the mast in solitary delectation would be the bourgeois as modern concertgoer. a voice of women—both the danger and the solution would be extreme. By Adorno’s reading. to the druglike charms of the other temptresses. Calypso. a voice of the past. The sailors with their plugged up ears are like the factory workers of the modern age: busy hands. he plugs up his sailors’ ears so they can row on undistracted while he has himself tied to the mast so as to listen in solitary safety. in fact resurfaces just where it seems most safely set aside? If the ‘‘appendage’’ or ‘‘excursus’’ in fact absorbs the book? If Adorno is inscribed within the Odyssey rather than the other way around? If what is presented as a provisional excursus or diversion—an excursion with a
. yes. the bourgeois genre par excellence. Adorno’s thinking at crucial junctures.1 In his reading of the Sirens episode Adorno reckons sharply just what the costs of Odysseus’s enlightenment might be. and. he wants to have it both ways: famously. represent the ‘‘other woman’’ in all the essential ways. Setting aside the question of just what it means for Adorno to be reading the Odyssey as an allegory—suspending. so conventional his calculations. that is (though this is perhaps the ultimate question) the precise relationship between ‘‘philosophy’’ and ‘‘literature’’—I’d like to consider what might have gone unread here. Let me propose that what is foreclosed in this reading may determine.

this moderate pleasure. Perhaps even more dangerous for Odysseus than sexual difference was the possibility that this very difference might be subverted. propaganda) which bears the unmistakeable stamp of Adorno. to the point that ‘‘difference’’ itself might come to receive the name ‘‘indifference. —Blanchot
What Adorno and Horkheimer leave understated is just how precarious Odysseus’s prophylactic remedy ultimately is. Perhaps that domination took a more speciﬁc form. rooted in a privilege which set him apart from the common condition . appropriate to a Greek of the period of decadence who never deserved to be the hero of the Iliad. the Sirens’ song still haunts? If I speak of ‘‘Adorno’’ here. It was not simply the lure of ‘‘nature’’ which seduced Odysseus.
Antinomies of the Upright Posture
This cowardly and tranquil pleasure. But perhaps they underestimate the Sirens’ real temptation. And thus it was not just domination-over-nature-in-general which had to be reasserted. technological reproduction. with its major discontents and its minor triumphs. . I’m using the name partly as a metonymy (for the overly cumbersome ‘‘Adorno-and-Horkheimer’’ pair). Nor was it just the temptation of a primordial past running counter to the work of civilization. as for so many others. then.
. But as we’ll see. Nor was it simply sexual difference which represented the greatest danger. It was not simply the erotic promise which was so alluring. . partly because there is reason to think that the Odysseus excursus is in fact largely Adorno’s own work. And perhaps the real temptation remained unthinkable. Horkheimer’s writings on the family are not irrelevant to this discussion.Adorno’s Siren Song
43
ﬁxed return—ends up being a sea voyage without an end in sight? If Adorno’s own Odyssey remains unﬁnished? And if. And it was not just that peculiar blend of sex and knowledge which was for Odysseus.2 but mostly because the repercussions of this reading are perhaps most visible in the discussion of the ‘‘culture industry’’ (music. Such a possibility would undermine the standard organization of such difference—opening the play of sexuality beyond the oppositional economy governing the conceptual space of work and power. this happy and conﬁdent cowardice.’’ And by this I don’t mean neutrality. irresistible.

living. The promise of history is at stake here—history in its totality. in fact. The Sirens claim to ‘‘know all the pain the Greeks and Trojans once endured on the spreading plain of Troy.10 in contrast. ‘‘all that comes to pass on the generous earth. strictly speaking. Culture—song—would relapse into ‘‘nature.9 The ‘‘honeysweet fruit’’ (meliedea karpon) of the lotus-ﬂowers (9.’’ according to the terms of Homer’s day (and ours)—what proved most irresistible to Odysseus was in fact the (‘‘male’’) promise of a knowledge so absolute it would rupture the bonds of ﬁnite subjectivity by assuming the impossible standpoint of the whole. The Sirens’ ‘‘honeyed voices’’ (meligerun op’) (12. at its limits.’’ To know. but at the cost of life. Memory would become forgetfulness. Odysseus would.’’4 In offering Odysseus to sing ‘‘his’’ song—to let him hear the whole epic story of his heroic exploits5 —they had effectively offered him the total perspective on life which is.’’ Levi-Strauss reminds us that honey (an uncooked but processed food. was the sexual identity of those who listened.56) voice and nectar (5.234) made them forgetful of their fatherland. A hypertrophic memory—Odysseus’s anticipation of his own posthumous reputation—would be indistinguishable from the lethal oblivion which would make a living death of every present. ‘‘natural culture’’ at its most alluring) is structurally ambivalent from the start. but at the cost of fame. Such fame—premature. in total recollection.6 How could Odysseus. only possible post-mortem.3 If their song was sweet and sensuous—‘‘female.221) and honeyed wine (10. the honeymoon would soon be over. hear his own song? If all autobiography is. private. Not that their own identity was all that secure.7 the Sirens’ promise would threaten to disturb the very economy of life and death on which the very order of narrative depends. By hearing his own fame. leaving only shriveled skins and bone-heaps.187).93) had promised immortality. promise a kind of memory. perhaps above all.44
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
What the Sirens threatened.8 For the living Odysseus to hear of his own heroic kleos would be to transgress the very logic of selfconsciousness. fame which therefore contradicts itself as fame—would swallow up its listener.11 If desire feeds on the narcissistic will-to-knowledge. as totality. It would have been an invitation to his own funeral. allothanatography (to hear your own true story—the whole story—you must be someone other than yourself and you must be dead). Circe’s beautiful song (10.94) had made the men forget the voyage home. in fact. Calypso with her beguiling voice (1.12 If honey is a traditional funerary offering to
. negate it. the anonymity of the unmourned dead.

46) lying strewn on the Sirens’ ﬂowery meadow— ˆ Vernant reminds us that ‘‘meadow’’ (leimon) in Greek signiﬁes also the female genitals13 —would be a warning to those who would ask too many ˆ questions (puthomenon). forgotten) would equally subvert the narrative order of time and history. becoming. to be quite slight. too. the distance would seem. at once both female seductress to the sailor men and male rapist to the sailor women. is able to spellbind (thelgein) any audience with his own singing eloquence (e. therefore. then.). of Greek embalming—in this case its ‘‘cultural’’ attributes would result in the excessive naturalness of an unmarked death: the corpse would be left to rot unremembered in the open air. impregnated by whatever calls? In letting that viscous sweetness penetrate would not the man become. he simultaneously both denies and conﬁrms their sexual confusion. But if the Sirens promise omniscience—a ‘‘masculinity’’ so total it would end up paradoxically reducing its bearer to a heap of bones—their appeal is sexually ambiguous in other ways as well.514ff. The evidence of the rotting corpses (anˆ ˆ dron puthomenon) (12. a woman?15 Understandably. preempting the Sirens’ aural rape by pressing the ‘‘honeysweet’’ (meliedea keron) (12. Hence the seasickness which accompanies every disturbance of the inner ear. For in closing up those gaping holes he must ﬁrst enter them. ultimately.Adorno’s Siren Song
45
the dead (24. its labyrinthine confusion would render precarious the sense of balance and the upright gait. between this blissful ignorance and that rapturous knowing.g.333.16
. must therefore acknowledge what he would most deny.68. cf. Between Calypso’s (5.. reducing his body to an open oriﬁce. But what would be the force of Odysseus’s strategy? Would it not reinstate the very ambiguity it was to cure? In ﬁlling his men’s ears with wax.14 Those who would hear an omniscient Pytho ˆ (Putho) in the Sirens’ meadow would ﬁnd. in turn. in effect. just the snake in the grass which is the temptation of forbidden knowledge. Odysseus himself—who. The woman who would sing back to Odysseus his heroic glory and the woman whose charm would make him forget all about it (thereby rendering him. Not to mention his own.170)—a standard ingredient. 11. Odysseus’s only counter-spell to the Sirens’ magic involves an emphatic reassertion of the phallic position.48) substance into their open oriﬁces. If the ear is in fact the essential organ of equilibrium and the erect posture. replacing epic remembrance with the premature recall which has oblivion as its end. moreover. What would it mean to seduce through song? Was the threat of the song not precisely that it assailed the passerby through the ear.72) and the Sirens’ ﬂowery meadow. Iliad 23. 17.

indeed. he had dragged them back weeping to the boat and tied them.. the tremendous ear was attached to a small. underneath the ear something was moving.208) and ‘‘honeyed words’’ (epessi meilichioisi) (9.20 Ptolemy Chennus. but a great one. ‘‘Until it hurts’’ (en desmo argaleo) he says.173. to get the besotted sailors away from the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus-ﬂowers. also. he insists that the plugged-up men tie him ˆ ˆ hard. told me that this great ear was not only a human being.
. suggests that Odysseus’s nickname ‘‘Outis’’ (‘‘nobody’’) indeed comes from the fact that he had ˆ big ‘‘ears’’ (ota). stiff with the erection that masks a deeper fearfulness. and I maintained my belief that it was an inverse cripple who had too little of everything and too much of one thing. honeying Odysseus becomes at once both seductive Siren and supreme victim of the Sirens’ power.17 Now. Odysseus would be just this cripple. all ears for the Sirens’ song.363) to the Cyclops prior to mutilating him.547)—this honeyed. above board and securely vertical. What does it mean for Odysseus to reassert his phallic position by having himself tied to the mast with cords? Odysseus—who was taught all about knots from the sorceress Circe (8. Earlier.e.46
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
who has administered ‘‘honeysweet wine’’ (meliedea oinon) (9. that a bloated little soul was dangling from the stalk. beneath the rowing benches (9. whether it was not Odysseus who seduced himself with his own drive to mastery. like a sail growing swollen with the Sirens’ swell.21 With ears like this does it matter what there is to hear? Kafka wonders whether the Sirens were not. quite silent.18 like the ‘‘inverse cripple’’ of which Nietzsche writes: An ear! An ear as big as a man! I looked still more closely—and indeed. no doubt of it. however.). horizontal. torso reduced to a giant ear. And.99f. But what is this body pinned immobile against the mast.447)—is no neophyte in bondage games. 10. But I never believed the people when they spoke of great men. and who has similarly soothed his own men with words of honey softness (meilichiois epeessi) (10. arms and legs helpless.19 Odysseus. The people. a genius. something pitifully small and wretched and slender. thin stalk—but this stalk was a human being! If one used a magnifying glass one could even recognize a tiny envious face. a rather touching detail in no way necessary to the strategy and in any case not part of Circe’s original instructions. a satirist from the second century c.

the enchainers. —Franz Kafka
Adorno of course had his own Sirens to contend with. Odysseus’s scar had been the very locus of self-identity. as he saw it. Odysseus was a scarred man.Adorno’s Siren Song
47
whether it was not indeed the cure itself which was in the end the real ¨ disease. Fully healed.407–9). ‘‘binding’’ and ‘‘spellbinding’’ share a common semantic thread23 —was only to redouble its constricting power? If the Sirens themselves were stringing Odysseus along with promises as binding as they were untethered? According to at least one etymology. the modern exile is unable to ﬁnd his way back home. the word for ‘‘cord’’ or ‘‘line’’ or ‘‘bandage’’: the enchanters would be. If Odysseus is the ﬁgure of eventual return-to-self and homecoming.24 Suggesting. By the 1930s the autonomous bourgeois subject had been. liquidated beyond repair. the word ‘‘Siren’’ relates to seira. as in other languages. having succumbed to the faascinations of the culture industry. signifying the security of lordly pedigree. shortcircuiting every scene of recognition. Who could withstand the vertical exaltation (Uberhebung) induced by the experience of the upright stance? ‘‘Against the feeling of having triumphed over them by one’s own strength. but the scar would have found its uses. that the binding power is from the outset split and doubled.’’22 And what would be the effect of such a binding? What if the binding which was homeopathically to counter the enchanting song—for in Greek.
Adorno’s Sirens
I have experience. full of memory of childhood. no earthly powers could have remained intact [widerstehen]. ﬁnally. the scar also marked the place where immediate recognition (by the servant woman Euryclea) could ﬁrst take place. preempting all return. It was a scar born in privilege. A double bind. Such a submission would have already disrupted the possibility of every nostos. its sutured smoothness
. giving back to ‘‘Nobody’’ (outis) his proper name. of family. and I am not joking when I say that it is a seasickness on dry land. and of tender convalescence. If the scar recalls the ‘‘pain’’ or ‘‘trouble’’ which is odussamenos Odusseos’s paternal destiny (19. to the hypnotic spell of a power which no longer needs to mask itself as such. then. and the subsequent ¨ exaltation [Uberhebung] that bears down on everything before it.

stripped of heroic appearances. Pain (in Hegelian fashion) is neutralized in the labor of the Concept. Nobody recognizes him except for his dog—who promptly drops dead (17. middle voice) (19. In a sense the interruption. The description of the scar in Book 19 would be the digression to end all digression: a little circle inscribed within the larger circle which is the hero’s wandering journey home. Adorno knew
. the very image of the home. Recall the famous scene. Eurycleia catches sight of a scar on his thigh (the hero’s identifying mark) at which point there is a long camera freeze. how well he was taken care of by his relatives. how many gifts he received. and puts him up for the night. disguised as a beggar. and the recognition scene is consummated. functions structurally as a microcosm or synecdoche of the Odyssey as a whole. patrimony. and signiﬁes nothing other than. Homer indulges in a lengthy ﬂashback. perhaps. conjuring up name. property—in no way threatens the coheren narrative of the recognition scene. When Homer is through with these details. ancestry. can tolerate such a digression without a strain. when it is the patriarchal details of Odysseus’s birthright which are being interpolated into the text. unhealing— would have made impossible any such enonomy of return. His wife is kind to the old beggar anyway. Just at the point where the nurse is about to exclaim aloud in recognition. together with its narrative overcoming. divested of his name. Auerback points out that the syntactical digression introduced by the scar’s description—the steeplechase of reminiscence unleased by Odysseus’s unveiling of his leg.326)—and particularly not Penelope. and so on. As Odysseus gets undressed. By contrast. the modern wound—unending. he says. There is a second ﬂashback contained within the ﬂashback: the mention of the grandfather reminds Homer of how Odysseus was named at birth: his name means ‘‘troublemaker’’ or ‘‘troubled’’ (odussamenos. everything snaps back into position. the event of recognition coincides precisely with the restoration of the etymon or proper name. The relaxed economy of the epic present. Odysseus has arrived home in Ithaca. Odysseus’s scar thus is.25 Particularly. telling Eurycleia the nurse (Odysseus’s own servant since infancy) to wash the stranger’s feet. and particularly when it is a servant woman who is waiting in the wings. recounts how as a young man Odysseus had been gored by a wild bore while hunting at his grandfather’s country estate.48
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
would be a sign that all that pain had been put to work.407). the nurse utters her long deferred exclamation.

says Adorno.33 Music for Adorno epitomizes the degradation of modern culture. ‘‘enchants’’ them. . all human beings have been as badly injured in their being and in the language as Heine the outcast was.’’26 He went on to speak of this wound as the universal diaspora which marks modernity as such. mutilated. on strike for better working conditions.’’ and hardly notice when the enchanting Josephine. Heine lived his exile as a wound. was. he wrote: ‘‘every intellectual in emigration is. . autonomous subject to the spellbound consumer. Once more a question of a premature and hence preemptive pleasure. has become our own. As the least obviously representational of all the art forms (a ‘‘non-mimetic mimesis’’) music would seem to have the supreme advantage in fulﬁlling art’s utopian mandate which is the expression of the
. reducing the alert. these rodent exiles—‘‘nearly always on the run’’—are at once too ‘‘childish’’ and ‘‘too old for music. disappearing31) the mass mouse audience fails to appreciate the pathetic squeaking which nonetheless. acquiescent to whatever calls. written on his deathbed while his own voice. perversely. Benjamin suggests that by Kafka’s day.’’28 it is the sign of the times that it falls on deaf ears. Or rather: it is a degenerate form of music which would have already infantilized its listeners. Once more it is a question of distraction and dispersal.32 Having missed out on proper childhood.’’34 it both carries the greatest emancipatory potential and would be therefore the most vulnerable to distortion. Who are the modern Sirens? If music’s very essence is to be the ‘‘surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked. That wound. In ‘‘Josephine the Singer’’ (Kafka’s ﬁnal testament.Adorno’s Siren Song
49
such exile. under the impact of tubercular laryngitis. ‘‘Vulgarization and enchantment.’’27 The threat of shipwreck has become a universal fact. the homelessness has also become everyone’s homelessness. stops singing. without exception. Once more it is a question of seduction through the ear. Once more it is a question of an impossible relationship to death. dwell together’’29 in the reiﬁed productions of mass music. the Sirens have fallen silent because music as such—the last ‘‘token of hope’’—has been permanently gagged. ‘‘Now that the destiny which Heine sensed has been fulﬁlled literally . they insist. hostile sisters. The propriety of the phallic subject is once more threatened by an emasculating voice which penetrates everywhere because it is located nowhere in space and time.30 This will not prevent them. As the ‘‘most immediate expression of instinct. from exerting a certain hypnotic spell. identifying with what he hears. In America.

Its very autonomy from signiﬁcation. Processed music becomes the conformist. . ‘‘The composition hears for the listener.’’42 If ‘‘human dignity’’—for Adorno as for Bloch—consists of the ‘‘right to walk. would entail a certain blindness to material origins which is the mark of every fetish.37 ‘‘Es ist babyfood.’’38 Because of the listener’s hallucinatory identiﬁcation with the apparatus. thus harbouring within itself its own congealed self-imitation or self-interpretation. the modern listener ﬁnds the sirens providing an instant self-interpretation. abstract entities. No less than the child devours the babyfood. Under the impact of sound recording. has become a ﬁlm. like standardized parts on an assembly line. that it is swallowed by the junk it swallows. Its components become interchangeable. Identifying with this process of abstraction.41 The ‘‘alien’’ product. repetitive spell which turns its listeners into the retarded. .’’ Lacking both voice and ear of his own.36 like the commodities they have indeed become. seeks to speak for the silent. It would thus seem to submit most readily to the commodifying force of capital. ‘‘Being consumed. is indeed just what I understand as ‘participation’ [Mitmachen] which is so totally characteristic for the new psychological type. ‘‘cut off from the masses by a dense screen. says Adorno. Lacking inner speech he now hears voices from the outside. Insofar as music has to be performed in order to be realized. It is in this sense half phantasmagorized from the start.’’43 the culture industry would have crippled the orthopaedia of the upright posture.36 its production and its reproduction would be in logical symbiosis from the outset. for Adorno. Delusional projection on the part of the listener strips him of the inner ‘‘voice of conscience’’ which provides the very possibility of self-reﬂection. reproduction overwhelms production and thus the self-alienation of music becomes complete. It anticipates its own alienation in its inner form. . its listeners become the undifferentiated consumers whose life. it becomes unclear who is consuming whom. mass culture (like Charybdis) devours him. predisgesting what they offer. children who keep on asking for the same old dish. easily alienated from its own performance. says Adorno.50
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
inexpressible. constituting their own audience before the fact. But in its privilege lies its weakness.’’40 It is equally unclear who is hearing whom. easily cut off from its own source. its ‘‘monadic’’ tendency to introversion. Reiﬁcation produces the ‘‘stiffness’’ or ‘‘rigidity’’44
. swallowed up. If the audience has been reduced to pure oriﬁce—a ‘‘great formless mouth with shining teeth in a voracious smile’’39 —it is just as true.

like the hideous convulsions of a wounded animal) the ‘‘jitterbugs’’—in Adono’s unusually vivid description— ‘‘whirl about in fascination. dogs. Like Odysseus stiff against the mast. After the ‘‘birth of ﬁlm out of the spirit of music. ‘‘Today every giant close-up of a star has become an advertisement for her name. remarks Adorno. crawling in grotesque rapture towards his sister’s violin.54 According to a familiar Platonic formula.’’53 The siren-bonds are tight.51 Adorno’s modern Circe has transformed men into ‘‘savages’’ and in turn into insects. Beneath the surface of the upright subject would be the distorted creatures of Kafka’s imaginary— mice. The ‘‘whimpering’’ vibrato46 or ‘‘eunuchlike sound’’47 of the jazz singer croons the comforts of impotence—stepping out only so as to step back in line—expressing only the ‘‘premature and incomplete or orgasm’’48 which keeps on cheating you of the real thing. that people no longer know how to dance. and with perhaps a similar gender subtext. every hit-
. the voice becomes a simulacrum of itself. the feet are unable to fulﬁll what the ear pretends.’’56 the voice becoming like an imitation of itself. moles. Adorno comments. The jitterbugs only ‘‘entangle’’ themselves all the more tightly in the next of reiﬁcation the more frantically they try to break away.’’50 Adorno reminds us that such vertical appearances can be deceptive.57 the ‘‘hit song’’ becoming an advertisement for itself. hunchbacks—until we come. Freud insisted. the original no longer holds. the spellbound listeners’ hard and jerky movements betray the impotence which is their fate. writhing in an ecstasy born of deepest deprivation. A genealogical catastrophe would hve disordered the very process of reproduction. sending out its own title as the only content it would announce. ‘‘As if to conﬁrm the superﬁciality and treachery of every form of ecstasy. to Gregor Samsa. somewhat tartly.Adorno’s Siren Song
51
which signify the compensatory erections of Medusa’s victims. ﬁnally.’’55 life itself becomes just like the movies. traveling salesman turned insect. Civilization’s defense. Circe’s magic had turned men into snufﬂing pigs (10. The ‘‘performance sounds like its own phonograph recording. was to institutionalize the upright posture in its repression of the sense of smell. the uncontrolled reproducibility of the artwork expresses itself as an inﬁnietely regressive mimetic ﬂux.49 But if the advertising industry would guarantee homo erectus his hard-won dignity in the form of ‘‘shining white teeth and freedom from body odor. Copy and original become indistinguish.’’45 Jazz listeners are the castrati who experience their own mutilation as an aesthetic pleasure.239).52 In a sadomasochistic parody of sexual ecstasy (or.

says Blanchot. In Home..’’ sing of nothing other than the fact that they are to sing: a song about itself. the ad promises the product. By stimulating a desire which it thereby frustrates (pornography in its essence). directed towards a singing which is always ‘‘still to come. penetrating all oriﬁces. promising to sing of ‘‘everything.’’63 Sound becomes the echo advertising nothing but its own publicity: ‘‘Advertising becomes art and nothing else. are indistinguishable. invading all space. just as Goebbels—with foresight— combines them: l’art pour l’art. there was already a ﬁne line between the song ‘‘itself’’ and its own announcement or replication. The ‘‘medicinal bath’’
. the culture industry makes the promise the very articulation of which would be its own denial. Radio assumes the phatic/phallic function of noise for the sake of noise.66 tantalized with a forepleasure so numbing it would preempt the greater urge to happiness. says Todorov.’’64 In an inﬁnitely circular deferral. thrilling song: ‘Come closer.59 Utopia becomes ‘‘merely a gilded background projected behind reality’’60 —i. . famous Odysseus—Achaea’s pride and glory— moor your ship on our coast so you can hear our song! Never has any sailor passed our shores in his black craft until he has heard the honeyed voices pouring from our lips.’’62 . or perhaps for those in Calypso’s cave. advertising for its own sake.61 A song. by Adorno’s account. a pure representation of social power.e.’’ the announcement and the act. they burst into their high. Odysseus’s Sirens.183–88) What would the difference between the promising song and the song which is promised? Promising is of course the paradigm instance of the performative utterance of which the ‘‘saying’’ and the ‘‘doing. for those like Plato’s prisoners. Art’s promesse de bonheur (‘‘once the deﬁnition of art’’67) would have been eliminated. the Siren’s promise sounds as sweet as the honeyed voice it promises: certainly its allure is as lethal. In Homer.52
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
song a plug [zum Plug] for its tune.’’58 ‘‘Only the copy’’ appears. a song about all song. . which in turn ‘‘incessantly reduces to a mere promise the enjoyment which it promises as a commodity. ‘‘The gigantic fact that speech penetrates everywhere replaces its content. The culture industry.’ (12. would have transformed such a radical performativity into the teasing specularity of sheer performance.’’65 The spectacles of Hollywood reduce the consumer to Tantalus.

indeed. The promissory note which . its demonic selfreplication would both soften the virile ‘‘ﬁrmness’’ of every subject and corrupt the legitimacy of every birth. a screeching siren. it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged.70
Reproductive Aberrations
It is perhaps unnecessary to emphasize that there is a certain gender subtext underlying Adorno’s denunciations. The menu replaces the meal: The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. This drains all
. Reproductive confusion at the aesthetic level suggests as always the fragility of the sexual contract. blocking hearing. blocking thought. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his selfabandonment to an everchanging sameness. According to a familiar Platonic logic. the promise preempts its own fulﬁlment: every promise becomes a threat. .Adorno’s Siren Song
53
of ‘‘fun’’ (das Fun)68 scrubs away the last utopian traces of happiness. is illusory: maliciously. an uncontrolled mimetic series would be indistinguishable from the wanton propagation which makes potential bastards of every offspring. the promise. his ¨ voice rises from street loud-speakers to resemble the howling of sirens announcing panic—from which modern propaganda can hardly be distinguished anyway. The National Socialists knew that the wireless gave shape to their cause just as the printing press did to the Reformation.216).69 In the totalitarian state. If the unproductive foreplay of the culture industry yields only the simulacral pleasures of false adversiting. Sound becomes. Even Telemachus is not so sure who his father is (1. that the diner must be satisﬁed with reading the menu. The new sirens are described as follows: The radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Fuhrer. . every invitation a call to panic. which is actually all the spectacle consists of. all it signiﬁes is that the real point will never be reached.

as a mere stimulus. says Freud.’’74 The detached or morcellized musical ‘‘theme’’ impresses itself indelibly in our memory. The atomized. comes unbid to will-less fascination. are induced by the stimulus of newness.75 It is death itself. Faithlessness and lack of identity. And this is just what happens.71 But the generational disturbance goes in both directions. Perhaps mankind’s renunciation of the wish for children is declared here.54
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
ﬁrmness [Feste] from characters. Adorno suggests that the genealogical relationship to the past is distorted along parallel lines. If mourning itself is. which already. spatialized time of serial music expresses just the rage against the past—Nietzsche’s ‘‘revenge’’ against the ‘‘it was’’—which is the mark of inauthentic memory. in the recycled tunes of the music industry. (Nietzsche’s vengeful listener danced. but this is equivalent to death. making us memorize what we cannot remember. the whirling ‘‘tarantella.’’ they ridicule that with which only yesterday they were most infatuated. unconsciously projects its wish for survival onto the chimera of the thing never known. as Adorno says. Mankind. idiotically inscribing what cannot be learned. if not the jitterbug. and Baudelaire had reason to extol infertile beauty. pathic responsiveness to situations. Wagner’s music has the mnemotechnic versatility that writing once did for Plato— music ‘‘designed to be remembered. What Baudelaire commanded through the power of images. because it is open to everyone to prophesy the worst: the new is the secret ﬁgure of all those unborn. hating the old and out-of-date
.72 A mourning gone astray.’’73 Berli´ oz’s idee ﬁxe puts the listener ‘‘under the spell of an opium dream. which goes most unremembered.’’78 In their frantic need to be ‘‘Uptodatesein. will always keep coming back to haunt us. If children have become the death wish of a fatherless society which has replaced authentic propagation with sterile propaganda. Malthus is one of the forefathers of the nineteenth century. adds Adorno. intended for the foregetful. no longer stimulates. thereby conﬁrming our general amnesia. Memory itself is at issue.’’)77 Regressed listeners ‘‘kill time because there is nothing else on which to vent one’s aggression. In its complicity with mass culture. the very ‘‘wound of civilization’’76 —a pure purposeless activity which challenges the functional efﬁciency of every order—it would be naturally the ﬁrst thing in an exchange society to undergo liquidation. That which is not put to rest by proper mourning. A ‘‘disturbed relationship’’ to the ancestors. of course. despairing of its reproduction.

to begin with. The ‘‘leader’’ would be the simulacral supplement for the missing father. who can be neither mourned nor.Adorno’s Siren Song
55
as if to avenge the fact that their own ecstasy has been. From ear to mouth.79 In a note ‘‘On the Theory of Ghosts. The prohibition on enjoying the mother’s body has not been registered or internalized: the father’s ‘‘No’’ remains unheard.84 If freedom presupposes the internalization of a prior authority. stage—mass psychology’s perversions would seem to turn. Replaced as well would be the traditional ‘‘warm and loving mother’’ whose very exclusion from the world of
. The modern funeral with its beautiﬁed Corpse’’ and takehome bottled ashes suits the ‘‘hardened’’ survivor mentality of the guilty80 —a reiﬁcation of life which has continued even unto death. overthrown.’’ Adorno relates the modern atomization of time to a radical failure of mourning. replacing the authority of the father with the power of administration. from Oedipal to pre-Oedipal: on this triply regressive axis—body. for Adorno. a ‘‘homecoming without a home. gender. ‘‘Mass’’ psychology has no such memory. Out-of-print books get set aside. the decline of the Oedipal family leads directly to the aberrant mourning patters of mass culture. The group’s ties would remain all pre-Oedipal:83 the incorporation of the mother’s body rather than the introjection of the father’s law. the sons project an archaic father imago before whom they fuse prostrate in helpless identiﬁcation. According to Freud. The unburied bones on the Sirens’ beach become. the decline of entrepreneurial capitalism would have dislodged the patriarchal order. a cheating of the dead. According to Adorno’s almost verbatim transcription of the Freudian group psychology. therefore. the adult capacity for resistance requires precisely that there be strong fathers to overcome. the ornaments of the crematorium.’’82 What would proper mourning be? Oedipal autonomy—and Freud recognized no other kind— required the son’s internalization of the father’s prohibition: the acquisition of a super-ego would be the only proper monument to the dead. replacing the self-legislating son with the compliant child who does whatever he is told. fake. Immigrants wipe away all traces of their past life.85 By Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s gloomy reckoning. Jessica Benjamin has outlined the issue well. from father to mother. some sort of misﬁred mourning leads directly to the phantasmagorias of ‘‘mass psychology. turning the self-reliant businessman into the scrambling employee.’’81 But let us not ignore the gender assumptions determining this whole discussion. Lacking a proper father to bury. The hatred of the past is itself the inability to give proper burial.

narcissistic can-
. The end of the family paralyses the forces of opposition.92 In the absence of effective paternal prohibition we ﬁnd an endless melancholic consumption substituting for the authentic work of mourning. The administration now works directly on its subjects.86 The ‘‘professional mother’’ (‘‘Mom’’87) turns affection into ‘‘hygiene. the capacity for reﬂection must also atrophy. instinctual or motivational conﬂict to be adjudicated. . partly by taking over the self-employed entrepreneur and partly by transforming the workers into the objects of a trade union.’’88 Woman ‘‘bustles about after cultural goals like a social hyena.) Monopoly capital has dispensed.90 Although Adorno is not exactly nostalgic for the patriarchal bourgeois family—I must stress this lack of nostalgia and note that on this score he differs markedly from Horkheimer91—he notes sharply that its demise would mean just the eclipse of the last opportunity for independent thought. but only slightly—since I’m actually quoting—both the rhetoric and the substance of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s argument. Governance no longer requires the internalization of social norms.’’89 And so on. . by which the tribunal of conscience is formed. (I parody. but also the resistance which. The family is no longer necessary or sufﬁcient to provide a buffer for and from the demands of civilization. notes Adorno somewhat sadly. says Adorno. the ﬁnal possibility of revolt: When the big industrial interests incessantly undermine the economic basis for moral decision by eliminating the independent economic subject.56
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
work and power had meant (imagined Horkheimer) a certain utopian transcendence of the principle of exchange. while the system lasts. With the erosion of the bourgeois family goes the last vestige of guilty inwardness—but at the same time. In fascism. Instead of the internalization of the social command which not only made it more binding and at the same time more open. with the need for superegos. . but also emancipated it from society and even turned it against the latter. not only the most effective agency of the bourgeoisie. rendering the detour through (self-) repression superﬂuous and obsolete. identiﬁcation reverts to the pre-Oedipal. ‘‘With the family there passes away. though repressing the individual. perhaps even produced him. there is an immediate and direct identiﬁcation with stereotyped value scales. There is no longer an internal. also strengthened.

in the end. .96 And what better ﬁgure for such a ﬁction than the ﬁgure of ‘‘the feminine’’? Lacking a proper father whose authority they might internalize. a woman. Man surrenders to man. the risk of disease. as woman did before him. an ‘‘organized imitation of magic practices. too.’’98 And thus we ﬁnd Adorno. Early Weimar ﬁlm theory. little is left to the imagination. Andreas Huyssen has outlined the issue well. chiming in with the nineteenth-century male imaginary—mass culture as woman—the fantasy of a lethal lassitude or an oceanic engulfment. Like positivists. In his essay on fascist propaganda. . so the nation genuﬂects before fascism.101 If Adorno does not exactly reproduce these fearful fantasies. and hack journalists. the orphaned masses simply absorb what they themselves put out: they embellish their own psychic overﬂow and go on to devour their own creation as an external thing.94 The phantasmagoria of fascist demagogy are the ﬁnal dissimulations of a banished mimetic impulse.’’97 Or again: ‘‘Now emotion is reserved to power conscious of itself as power. . The seeds of homosexuality are sown. the masses become.99 From Nietzsche’s polemic against Wagner’s hypnotic effeminacies through Le Bon’s description of the sphinxlike crowd to Eliot’s depiction of the lure of mass society as a return to an encompassing womb. invented him. provincial actors.Adorno’s Siren Song
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nibalism which subverts the (male) achievement of normal growth. Adorno suggests that the relative absence of paternal authority in the present creates the projective phantasm of the ‘‘leader image. was quick to pronounce on the dangers to hygiene posed by the ‘‘dark hole’’ (Kracauer100) of the movie theater: the stuffy air.’’ a ‘‘mimesis of mimesis. the fantasy of a watery grave. ﬁnally.’’95 ‘‘Group psychology’’ is jut this ﬁction. bleak and unyielding. ‘‘They look like hairdressers. in fact. playing the role of ‘‘leader’’ to an enchanted public who cannot tell the real thing from the fake. the risk of sexual contact itself. Man turns into a woman gazing up at her master. ‘‘Just as women adore the unmoved paranoiac.’’ Instead of internalizaing a real authority. the blurring of class and gender divisions.93 Where legitimate authority has withdrawn—Adorno suggests thereby that it once existed—an amorphous (almost Foucauldian) ‘‘power’’ steps in to ﬁll the vacuum left by the unmourned dead. the leader is just an actor. But because the leader himself is only deputizing for the powerless individuals who have. he doesn’t exactly dispel them
.’’ writes Adorno. they ‘‘discover’’ what they have in fact ‘‘made’’—and proceed to eat it. cold.

102 Apollodorus speaks of her promiscuity. Odysseus came home.249f. Penelope’s web had become the very image of feminine prevarication. She dreams with pleasure about her collection of pet geese (19.104 (Telemachus meanwhile is said to go on to marry stepmother Circe..209–30). Even in antiquity she was considered too boringly good to be mythologized. Certainly the suitors see her as another Siren. she wove.58
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either.108 Odysseus. Penelope herself professes to understand Helen’s adultery as. Telemachus doesn’t trust her to protect the family property in his absence (15. sleeping with the suitors. Later tradition turned her into a slut. a sign of promiscuity and diversion.). Leaving us to wonder. a spider’s web. treats her with jealous suspicion on his return.537). fathering Latinus in the process. ﬁnally. its allure would be perilously close to the distracting exile it was to end. who appears one day in Ithaca to murder his father—and bearing Italus.107 The men she feeds among the pigs become just like the pigvictims of Circe’s magic.)105 By the Renaissance.
Penelope
When Ulysses and Penelope are in bed and telling their stories to one another. Agamemnon backhandedly compares her to a Clytemnestra (11. being sent away in disgrace upon Odysseus’s return. a trap.. where this modern Odysseus has a leg to stand.79–81). What was there to say? She was faithful. she ends up marrying Telegonus—Odysseus’s illegitimate son by Circe. but that is another story. cf. Athena insinuates that she’s just hunting for another man (15. Penelope too knows
. after whom Italy was named.103 As Hyginus tells it. 24.20–23). I believe a male writer would have made Ulysses’s story come ﬁrst and Penelope’s second. —Samuel Butler
Or is there another sexual economy at play? I haven’t mentioned Penelope—few do.433f. He complains bitterly that to the eager suitors she won’t say yes or no (1.106 But even in the Odyssey her identity was less secure than one tends to think.88–91). 16. His homecoming takes place while he’s wrapped in a slumber so ‘‘sweet’’ (hedistos) it’s compared to death (13.730). a normal ‘‘error’’ (23. who rarely sees ﬁt to mention her on his travels. If homecoming is said to be ‘‘honeysweet’’ (as Teiresias puts it109).200f. Penelope tells hers ﬁrst. after all. By the Hellenistic period the fantasies were going full steam.

or keep on sending them back to the shop to change things. The telltale signs are numerous: the obsession with womanly matters. Penelope is the only one to resist his siren spell. .112 But was not Penelope’s weaving quite essential? Did it not represent a desire so vertiginous that it could not come to term? Penelope’s ‘‘seductiveness’’ is in fact inseparable from her weeping. Penelope’s grief cannot end.384f. and then scold them. In 1897. For like her weaving. he complains. When the bard Phemius charms the entire company with his singing (1.110 and ﬁnally the whitewashing of Penelope’s name.’’ Butler adds. .342) (in
. or play them music of her own composition? I have always found these courses successful when I wanted to get rid of people.Adorno’s Siren Song
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how to ‘‘enchant’’ (thelgein) men’s hearts with ‘‘words of honey’’ (meilichiosis epeessi) (18. make them stick to it. ‘‘and not getting any younger.) until their ‘‘knees slacken’’ and ‘‘hearts dissolve’’ of her web routine (2.283): she too knows how to ‘‘fan’’ and ‘‘inﬂame’’ their passion (18. Her ‘‘unforgettable sorrow’’ (penthos alaston) (1.337–44).160f. . the various inconsistencies and bad logic. . and then there was boring did she ever try that? Did she ever read them any of her grandfather’s letters? Did she sing them her own songs. In a word. .’’111 After all. ‘‘Did she every try snubbing?’’ he asks. Did she ask [them] to sit to her for her web—give them a good stiff pose. . It would have been easy enough for Penelope to get rid of the suitors if she had really wanted. she must have been a good forty. The slaughtered suitors are described as ﬁsh caught in a net (23. .89). ‘‘All she had to do was to bolt the door. did she do a single one of the thousand things so astute a matron would have been at no loss to hit upon if she had been in earnest about not wanting to be courted? With one touch of common sense the whole fabric crumbles into dust. and talk to them all the time? Did she ﬁnd errands for them to run. and say she did not want them? Or make them do commissions for her and forget to pay them.). the trivial housewifely details. Her prevarication is itself the ultimate promise that so defers itself that it unravels its own point. for what it’s really like to be a man in love. Samuel Butler reads the Odyssey and concludes that a woman must have written it. The ‘‘authoress’’ of the Odyssey’’ has no feel. The weaving proves not only to be deceptive but to be quite fatal. . .

the swineherd. To trust and to be trusted are. This grief would be. he writes of the endless longing which feeds off an inﬁnite loss. in its patience its greatest zeal. the son. The double bind of being Odysseus’s wife. it’s only male companions like Patroclus and Achilles who get the familiar epithet of pistos.) Were Penelope to allow herself to be seduced too quickly by Odysseus. art cannot wait. If Penelope’s faithfulness is said to be the very condition of Odysseus’s heroic reputation (24. for this woman.113 Her reticence is at once both the condition and the limit of his heroic kleos: she withdraws from the intersubjective arena she opens up. Her nurse reproaches her for being ‘‘untrusting’’ (23. quite ‘‘unforgettable’’— endless precisely where it is most uncertain what exactly has been lost. In Prisms. like Penelope’s. Unseduced even when Odysseus appears in dazzling. In the Aesthetic Theory. But could a wife in such a circumstance ever be fully pistos? To trust and to be trusted would seem here to be at odds. at moments. if h is glory requires that his wife wait patiently at home. therefore. Penelope’s own double bind now comes to light. Adorno writes: ‘‘Like knowledge. In its tenacity would be its urgency. In this tension between mourning and desire. greased-up splendor—the very charm that worked well enough on Nausicaa (6. Adorno writes that for ‘‘the one who no longer has
. but as soon as it succumbs to impatience it is doomed. Unlike the dog. typically.72). she does not in fact recognize her returning husband. Her son reproaches her for her hardheartedness (23. Not knowing whether Odysseus is dead or alive—not knowing. The word in Greek is apistos: it means in fact both untrusting and untrustworthy.97–103). Adorno himself had glimpses of this Penelope. it is ironic that Penelope herself won’t participate in the general recognition she renders possible.230–35)—Penelope remains stony and inert. quite irreconcilable. her trust would betray her real untrustworthiness. this wife demands an inﬁnity of proofs. Perhaps. Neither mourning nor not-mourning. it is a sorrow which is ‘‘unforgettable’’ simply because it cannot come to term. and the father.’’114 Such burning patience feeds on a grief which knows neither healing nor recompense. the full measure of her loss—she can neither mourn nor abstain from mourning. the nurse. (In Homer.60
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her words) won’t accept the drug of musical comfort.192–202). No comfort could assuage this. In Minima Moralia. The stubbornness of its attachment introduces within mourning a desire which refuses the consolation of every partial nourishment and thus stakes a claim on a happiness outstripping every fact.

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a homeland,’’ writing itself becomes the only place to live.115 Such a place would be the non-place of a permanent wandering, an odyssey without a ﬁnal end. But here Odysseus would have become none other than Penelope. His intransigence would have become just her expectancy: a kind of ‘‘seasickness,’’ as Kafka remarked, which now is felt everywhere on dry land. The bonds would loosen just where they would seem to be the tightest. In such a loosening, the text as such is formed. ‘‘Properly written texts,’’ writes Adorno, ‘‘are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and ﬁrm.’’116 In the Aesthetic Theory, he writes of the special ‘‘cunning’’ of the artwork. It unravels its own will to mastery and incorporates its own failure to totalize as an esssential moment of its truth. The paradigm of this cunning is none other than Penelope. The unity of logos, because it mutilates, is enmeshed in the nexus of its own guilt. Homer’s tale of Penelope, who in the evening unraveled what she had accomplished during the day, is a selfunconscious allegory of art: What cunning Penelope inﬂicts on her artifacts, she actually inﬂicts on herself. Ever since Homer’s verses this episode is not the addition or rudiment for which it is easily taken, but a constitutive category of art. Through this story, art takes into itself the impossibility of the identity of the one and the many as an element of its unity. Artworks, no less than reason, have their cunning.117 In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard writes of the ‘‘inﬁnite resignation’’ which sacriﬁces without hope of restitution. Such renunciation is not (yet) compromised by the consolations of religion, with its comforting hope of recompense. It thus installs a mourning which is not yet that of the knight of faith, whose leap—and this is of course precisely what Adorno was to ﬁnd most irritating about him118 —involved the absurd conviction that he would somehow get his own back. ‘‘Inﬁnite resignation’’ would have no such knightly conﬁdence. Its melancholy would exceed the economy of every homecoming; in its rigorous hopelessness would lie its only strength. Kierkegaard writes: Inﬁnite resignation is that shirt we read about in the old fable. The thread is spun under tears, the cloth bleached with tears, the shirt sewn with tears; but then too it is a better protection than

62

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iron and steel . . . The secret in life is that everyone must sew it for himself, and the astonishing thing is that a man can sew it fully as well as a woman.119

Notes
¨ 1. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklarung, Gesammelte Schriften vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 64 (‘‘Abenteuerroman’’), 80 (‘‘Robinsonade’’). Hereafter cited as GS. In English as Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1969), 46, 61. Hereafter cited as DE. Throughout this chapter I will be citing the standard English translations of Adorno with some modiﬁcations as indicated. 2. Although Robert Hullot-Kentor argues that Horkheimer’s inﬂuence is evident in this chapter as elsewhere in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. See Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘‘Back to Adorno,’’ Telos 81 (1989): 5–29. 3. Early Greek representations of the Sirens show them as sexually ambiguous, frequently bearded ﬁgures. See John Pollard, Seers, Shrines, and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), 140. 4. Homer, Odyssey, Homeri Opera, ed. David B. Munro and Thomas W. Allen (London: Oxford University Press, 1917); in English, trans. Robert Fagles (New York and London: Penguin, 1996), Book 12, lines 205–7. All references will henceforth be given in the text by book and line numbers only (Greek edition). 5. On the connection between the Sirens and the Iliadic Muses, see Pietro Pucci’s remarkable rhetorical analysis in ‘‘The Song of the Sirens,’’ Arethusa 12 (1979): 121–31. 6. Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘‘Feminine Aspects of Death in Ancient Greece,’’ Diacritics 16 (1986): 54–64. ´ 7. Cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘L’Echo du sujet,’’ Le sujet de la philosophie: Typographies I (Paris: Aubier: Flammarion, 1979) 217–303. It is striking that at the court of the Phaeacians, Odysseus speaks of his own heroic glory (kleos) in the ﬁrst person (‘‘I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known to the world for every kind of craft—my fame has reached the skies’’ [9.19f ]). Charles Segal remarks that it is unusual in Greek to speak of ‘‘my kleos’’ (kleos or fame normally enunciated only in the third person—not for a speaker to advertise about himself—and typically only after the hero’s death). See ‘‘Kleos and its Ironies in the Odyssey,’’ in Harold Bloom, ed., Homer’s The Odyssey (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 128f. The trip to Hades in Book 11 (prior in the order of experience, posterior in the order of telling) has already given Odysseus a premature taste of death, a death before death, rendering him, as Circe aptly remarks, twice mortal (disthanees): ‘‘doomed to die twice over—others just die once’’ (12.22). And indeed, in response to Alcinous, Odysseus announces his tale, the story of his own kleos, as a mourning performance, a narrative grief which redoubles the grief which his life as such has, according to him, become. ‘‘But now you’re set on probing the bitter pains I’ve borne, / so I’m to weep and grieve, it seems, still more. / Well then, what shall I go through ﬁrst, / what shall I save for last?’’ (9.12ff.). The very compulsion to narrate would seem to transgress the bounds of what ‘‘I’’ can say of myself, thus making the act of speech not only an act of mourning for the lost object but, indeed, a form of self-mourning, an impossible mourning for the lost subject. 8. Cf. Odysseus’s urge to impart sequential order to his narrative of grief, a grief which in its excessiveness threatens precisely to explode such sequence, or render it arbitrary: ‘‘Well, then, what shall I go through ﬁrst, / what shall I save for last? / What pains—the gods have given me my share. / Now let me start by telling you my name . . .’’ (9.15–17).

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9. On the mythological connection between the Sirens and the underworld, and the possibility that the Sirens themselves were seen at some point as mediating between the living and the dead (early Greek paintings represent the Sirens as birds, thus corresponding, perhaps, to the Egyptian ba or soul-bird), see Georg Weicker, Die Seelenvogel in der alten Literatur und Kunst (Leipzig: Teubner, 1902), and K. Buschor, Die Musen des Jenseits (Munich: Bruckmann, 1944). See also the critical ¨ discussion by Karoly Marot, Die Anfange der griechischen Literatur (Budapest: Ungarische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1960), 106–87. For a good survey of the issue, see Siegfried de Rachewiltz, De Sirenibus: An Inquiry into Sirens from Homer to Shakespeare (New York: Garland, 1987), 254–75, as well as Gerald Gresseth, ‘‘The Homeric Sirens,’’ Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 101 (1970). It is worth recalling here that in the allegory of the afterlife in the last book of the Republic, Plato has the soul encounter the Sirens (eight of them, almost Muselike) presiding over the spindle of Necessity, singing the music of the spheres (616b–617d). ´ 10. According to at least one etymology, the word for Siren is related to the word seiren—‘ ‘inherited from some Mediterranean language’’—signifying a mantic bee. See Gabriel Germain, ‘‘The Sirens and the Temptation of Knowledge,’’ in George Steiner and Robert Fagles, eds., Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962) 96. The association is particularly interesting insofar as the industrious bee was typically valorized in Greece as the very image of feminine virtue. See for example the Homeric hymn to Hermes and Laurence Kahn’s superb essay, ´ ` ´ ´ Hermes passe ou les ambiguites de la communication (Paris: Maspero, 1978). 11. Pietro Pucci points out that the Sirens, despite the proximity of their attributes and diction to the (Iliadic) Muses, do not actually speak of kleos by name. See ‘‘The Song of the Sirens,’’ 130n9. Charles Segal makes the parallel point that, like Hesiod’s Muses, the Sirens speak not of memory but of a kind of immediate ‘‘knowing’’ (idmen . . . idmen, 12.205–7); see ‘‘Kleos and its Ironies in the Odyssey,’’ 145. ´ 12. Claude Levi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, trans. John and Doreen Weight (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). On the semantic ﬁeld of ‘‘honey’’ in early Greek literature, see Pietro Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). See also Jan Hendrik Waszink, Biene und Honig als Symbol des Dichter und der Dichtung in der griechische Literatur ` (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1974) and Kahn, Hermes. 13. Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘‘Feminine Figures of Death in Greece.’’ 14. Emily Vermeule (Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry [Berkeley and Los Angeles: ˆ ˆ University of California Press, 1979], 203) relates the andron puthomenon of 12.46 to the pun on the rotting Python at Delphi. 15. We know that Odysseus (who ‘‘does not resemble an athlete’’ [8.164] and whose ‘‘legs have lost their condition’’ [8.233]) is rather prone to cry at music. Upon hearing Demodocus’s epic chant at the court of Alcinous, he was reduced to tears (8.86–93), compared, indeed, to a widow weeping over the body of her dead husband (8.521–29). At 10.410ff. Odysseus’s men cluster around him as calves around a cow. On the question of ‘‘role reversal’’ in general in the Odyssey, see Helene P. Foley, ‘‘ ‘Reverse Similes’ and Sex Roles in the Odyssey,’’ in John Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan, eds., Women in the Ancient World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 59–78. 16. Odysseus is also compared to a bard at 11.368 and, indirectly, at 21.406–11. It is worth noting that in late antiquity Orpheus sometimes stands in for Odysseus in the Sirens episode. Apollonius of Rhodes has Orpheus outwit the Sirens by playing their own game—literally outsinging them with his lyre. See Argonautica IV.891–92, trans. R. C. Seaton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1912). 17. The escape from Polyphemus’s cave similarly involved tying the surviving sailors (horizontally) onto the back of the Cyclops’s male sheep (9.429f. ), Odysseus himself having mutilated the Cyclops with a (vertical) beam the size of a ‘‘mast’’ (9.322). Later, back home in Ithaca, in a kind of parodistic redoubling of the Sirens episode, and in terms which semantically link the Sirens with the prophylactic remedy against them, Odysseus will have the treacherous cowherd Melanthios tied ´ ´ up with a ‘‘braided rope’’ (seiren plekten) and hoisted up a ‘‘high column’’ (22.175f.).

and sociology. of analyzing the subject’s
. Stated plainly: it is no longer a question. in this work. is the paradigm shift it marks in the analysis of power.4
A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
Horkheimer and Adorno Revisited
Andrew Hewitt
One of the reasons for the continued inﬂuence exercised by Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment1—a work which could scarcely be more clearly marked by the historical context of its creation—upon current theoretical debates in the realms of politics. Dialectic of Enlightenment effects a move away from the analysis of domination as an essentially binary structure and toward the examination of power as a complex system of mediation. Wedged between the dual threats of American consumerism on the one hand and Nazism on the other. aesthetics.

Dialectic of Enlightenment offers a rigorous historical recontextualization of the master-slave dialectic. and of the historical implementation of that subject—a la Foucault—but rather they insist upon a historical mutation in the structure of subjectivity. perhaps. function as bearers of a power which neither actually possesses. for all that he is dominated by a broader system of power. inevitable. we present the ideological structure of fascism as such that the dominated—by means of an escalation of domination. however. held power over a group even lower down the ladder (even if that power is but power over external nature.2 If. however. meanwhile. Dialectic of Enlightenment can be read alongside other early attempts to understand the movement as something more than a massive conﬁdence trick played upon an unsuspecting democracy. Horkheimer and Adorno aim to understand why it is that both participants in the complex of domination should connive at the system which in turn dominates them. would be directed toward the dominated—what stake do they have in this continued subordination? This shift in analysis is dictated not by methodological imperatives.70
Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno
domination of its object. all too understandable. does not cease to dominate—should trade off his own subordination to a network of power in order to maintain his own direct privilege is. pushing the Hegelian model to that extreme point where the very category of enslavement crumbles beneath the coercive weight of universal consent. to cover an historical period stretching back as far as the Greeks—threatens to cloud the historical and political clarity of the analysis. dominator and dominated. At the same time. To this extent. The question. a mutation brought about by capitalism as the rationalized instantiation of Enlightenment thought. Both Subject and Object. indeed. While it may be possi-
. Motivated by an attempt to understand the emergence of fascism as a popular movement. but rather of exploring that discursive system of power in which effects of domination—oriented around notions of Subject and Object—are possible. As an analysis of fascism. then we will have missed the speciﬁcity of Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the etiology of power. or over an unruly internal nature). in turn. the somewhat vague historical contours of the very term ‘‘enlightenment’’—as it is used in this work. but rather by the twin historical phenomena of Nazism and mass consumerism. a superimposition of hierarchy upon hierarchy—can always point to a situation in which they. Horkheimer and Adorno do not offer an epistemology of the sub` ject. That the dominator—who. and. then.

reject the false gods of ‘‘ideology’’ so central to fascism. of course. Exploitation. it nevertheless obliges us to delineate more clearly just how power—as ‘‘totality’’—operates in this work. on the one hand. classically. fascism could no longer be accounted for as an aberration or a swindle. The logic and desirability of power (as domination) is thereby assumed. What Horkheimer and Adorno are analyzing is political power not as a given. the same was true for capitalism. Moreover. but as a speciﬁc manipulation of the more fundamental power of representation. its philosophical metadiscourse. At the same time. such a presentation fails to examine the pathology of domination itself. though Dialectic of Enlightenment—complete with its theses on anti-Semitism—clearly responds to the historical phenomenon of fascism. It goes without saying that Dialectic of Enlightenment cannot be read from a poststructuralist perspective as a model or precursor of theories of totalitarianism. For consumer capitalism—in its purest form—would consist precisely in the refusal to subordinate fundamental categories of economic exploitation to compensatory political and ideological structures of domination. Thus. Thus. the speciﬁc organization of capitalism served to radicalize the critique of the complicity of the dominated. It is precisely this assumption that Horkheimer and Adorno seek to address. in which the experience of being dominated is always effaced by one’s own domination of others. power is always already the ﬁeld of possibility of domination. In the America of the New Deal—that is to say. If. for Horkheimer and Adorno the speciﬁc form of swindle central to capitalism—the swindle of the exploitation of labor—could no longer be analyzed within an agonistics of domination. but had to be explained within a language game of consent. While this observation is in itself banal. Power—as a collusive system of domination—is taken as a system of
. in the period of capitalism’s potential resurgence as a welfare state—power could no longer be thought purely in terms of the economic. as the economic modality of repression and domination. the speciﬁcity of its analysis of power is more directly attributable to the exile experience in America. domination is always the syntagmatic instantiation of power—even when it is no longer experienced as such. The religion of the market-place would. needed to be rethought. In a sense.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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ble—if not necessarily correct—to analyze fascism in terms of a pure domination. Clearly this text does not analyze totalitarianism as a blanket term covering both fascism and communism: the key analytical observations arise from the insights afforded by the comparison of capitalism and fascism.

perhaps. mediation—of domination itself by representation. since individuation itself is a process which can only occur within rather than against power: ‘‘the individual—the self—is man no longer credited with the magical power of representation [Stellvertretung]’’ (51).
. This does not necessarily mean that the analysis of power negates the concept of domination—only that power has become the condition of consciousness and has therefore rendered inaccessible the experience of domination. perhaps. be the monopolization of the means of representation (as exchange)—and power the impossibility of such a monopoly. at least. What is notable. it is in and around ﬁgures of women—or. possess the power to represent—one is represented. perhaps it can itself be experienced: such would seem to be the subterranean hope of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. might be possible. What makes possible the movement from a dyadic model of domination to a complex and mediated analysis of power-systems is the domination—or. such a return seems to be a dead-end. some escape from the totality of power. historical reconﬁguration of domination as power. In other words. If the loss of experience (of domination) cannot be made good. while we might wish to read Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis in the tradition of the master-slave dialectic. it can no longer be a question—at least at the level of individual intentionality—of the struggle for power. it seems. a response to a speciﬁc.72
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representation in Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘‘Just as the capacity of representation [Vertretbarkeit] is the measure of domination [Herrschaft]. the analysis is. this work is not primarily an analysis of hegemonic strategies. is that where such possibilities are articulated in terms of a potential agency. and yet such a restoration necessarily risks a return to the direct experience of domination. There are moments when it seems that some restoration of experience. so the capacity of representation is the vehicle of progress and regression at one and the same time’’ (34–35). Domination would. Indeed. Politically. It is this loss of experience that Horkheimer and Adorno seek to repair. One does not possess power—one is possessed by it. Power is domination by representation—it is the system in which even the putative origin of domination must itself be constituted representationally. Within power. be reduced to the level of an analysis of ideology. as an individual. however. in fact. the absence of a cohesive theory of hegemony in the work might be seen as the source of its pessimism. one does not. and domination is the most powerful thing that can be representated in most performances. The analysis of representational power in Dialectic of Enlightenment cannot. however.

elevated the conditions they were used to substantiate to the level of true reality. They comment explicitly on the issue of philosophy’s phallocentrism in passages such as the following: By virtue of the claim to universal validity. the initial—and damning—exclusion of women from the philosophical project is reworked as a potential exemption from the totality both of power as ontologized domination and of reason as a system of closure. It is necessary to ask how are women included—or rather. how are they constituted within an all-inclusive discourse. they reﬂected with equal clarity the laws of physics. yet I would suggest that women are included in this work—somewhat paradoxically—precisely by their exclusion. however. Above all. For the representation of woman is not simply one representation among many—it occupies a pivotal role in the work and binds together the various strands of a critique oriented now toward philosophy. Women are instrumentalized as the representatives of the possibility of exclusion understood as an escape from the all-inclusive system of power. These concepts originated. On the one hand. Of course. as Vico puts it. this is a classic dilemma of feminist theory. In fact. now toward science. Horkheimer and Adorno are aware of the exclusion of women as a condition of possibility of the philosophical discourse within and against which they work. the philosophic concepts with which Plato and Aristotle represented the world. the very rethinking of power as representation is inextricable from the thematization of woman in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. and one which Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis dramatizes in its attempt to instrumentalize
. for power is about inclusion. (22) It is not enough. historical necessity demands that one work within an analysis of power. and yet to work on such an analysis is necessarily to work within a masculine discourse. now toward politics. children and slaves. In other words. To work within the tenuous utopian margins of the feminine in the Dialectic of Enlightenment is necessarily to embroil oneself in a series of performative contradictions.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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a fantasm of the feminine—that they are collected. This seems to be the key issue which confronts any attempt at a feminist reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment. in the marketplace of Athens. the equality of full citizens and the inferiority of women. now toward art. simply to problematize this exclusion.

as the substrate of never-ending subsumption notionally. (111) While more recent feminist analyses of the identiﬁcation of woman and nature may have rendered it difﬁcult for us to appreciate the originality of Horkheimer and Adorno’s presentation of feminine nature as a historical construct. That such an attempt entails a number of contradictions is clear even at the level of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s own operation as a linguistic performance. What must be questioned is the possibility of ever ‘‘getting it right. a contradiction already operative in the simple statement that ‘‘Man as ruler denies woman the honor of individualization. in reality—and in language—it is virtually impossible not to do one or the other. In other words.’’3 While one might wish neither to examine a putative primary object and its subsequent representation. For it is important to mark the unavoidable performative contradiction that the assertion involves. and therefore male logic sees her wholly as standing for nature. Horkheimer and Adorno problematize man’s discursive domination of woman in the following terms: Man as ruler denies woman the honor of individualization. the individual is an example of the species. One must be careful not to suggest that Horkheimer and Adorno somehow ‘‘got it wrong’’ about women. For example.’’ To which ‘‘woman’’ does man deny this honor? Clearly. Socially. nor to ontologize the impossibility of representation as a characteristic of that object. their formulation nevertheless retains an exemplary clarity in its very ambiguity. by forcing her into the singular yet generic category of ‘‘woman’’? This is not a ‘‘mistake’’ on Horkheimer and Adorno’s part. it is to no woman in particular. and of never-ending subjection in reality. but rather to woman in general that the interdiction extends.74
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woman as a way of escaping the closure of traditional philosophical logic. Woman as an alleged natural being is a product of history which denaturizes her. Horkheimer and Adorno are obliged to repeat the generalizing gesture they condemn. How is it possible—simply at the level of semantics—to critique Horkheimer
. a representative [Vertreterin] of her sex. But this is precisely the problem: woman is always ‘‘in general’’—by virtue of that very interdiction. How can it be asserted that ‘‘woman’’ is denied the honor of individualization without once again denying her the honor of individualization. a ‘‘slip’’ which I—another male critic—need simply point out.

’’ A second response would be: ‘‘Yes. What would be the implications of disagreement? To disagree with the statement would open even more possibilities and double binds. you once again collectivize her.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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and Adorno for once again denaturizing ‘‘woman. once again. then. What response. in other words. simply a way of obscuring Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘‘intention. but let us look at the possibilities this cooptive inclusion opens up for women in the interstices of the philosophical system. In isolating ‘woman’ as something which is always collectivized. If the problem is exacerbated for the male reader. is the inescapable element of totalitarian logic which informs the critique of rational totalization worked out in Dialectic of Enlightenment. An analysis of the rhetoric of Dialectic of Enlightenment is not. and something must be done about it. for example. This. would be adequate to the assertion that ‘‘Man as a ruler denies woman the honor of individualization’’? One might answer: ‘‘Yes. can women be thought and represented at all? Yet how.’’ But these are only the answers possible in the afﬁrmative. Such a move would involve arrogating to oneself the power to deny that one has the power to impose such a notion. There is something in the rhetoric of reading which tends to masculinize in order to elicit an ‘‘adequate’’ response. can theory resist thinking precisely as that which cannot be thought or represented? The problem extends from the dilemma as to whether to use singular or plural nouns—whether to ‘‘rectify’’ or accept as unavoidable the generic effacement of women/woman—to the problematic notion of any notion of the ‘‘feminine’’ itself. such is the discursive violence practiced by a masculine discourse.’’ without partaking in the same violent abstraction? How. The critic’s most earnest disavowel of any desire to reimpose a notion of ‘‘the feminine’’ is itself profoundly paradoxical.’’ And a third reply might go as follows: ‘‘Yes.’’ For what is at stake—both in my critique and in theirs—is the possibility of isolating any such intention once the philosophical discourse in question has been accepted as a framework for analysis. which illustrate the complicity of Horkheimer and Adorno
. When I use ‘‘the feminine’’—or any such term—am I referring to a construct whose ideology Horkheimer and Adorno already critique? Or perhaps to an alternative model which they propose in their more ‘‘utopian’’ moments? Or perhaps I am operating with some unspoken notion of my own? The question is strictly undecidable. and there you go again. the power of intentionality is invoked in order to be denied. perhaps. the nature of the philosophical rhetoric is such that the same question remains for a woman reader also.

On what authority might one disagree? Primarily. This is more than just a play with words. man’s denial of the honor of individualization to woman becomes potentially positive when read within the context of that more general alienation which is the book’s theme.’’ if she is held to be ‘‘an example of the species. might she then be supposed to retain ‘‘the magical
. The critic is obliged to read woman not as the possibility of a real opening up of the boundaries of the work. as a woman. the impossibility of negation dramatizes the difﬁculties of simply exempting oneself from the philosophical discourse. In other words. then. but as a ﬁgure whose utopian possibilities are entirely bound to the presuppositions of the discourse in question. it could be argued. Horkheimer and Adorno—that man ‘‘denies woman the honor of individualization’’ itself serves as a further strategy of exclusion. The problem is as follows: if woman is denied the ‘‘honor of individualization. Furthermore. one can question whether the so-called ‘‘honor of individualization’’ does anything more than rob us of power—the power of representation. But in claiming the authority of woman. if woman escapes this paradoxical self-constitution and self-negation of individualization. if even to speak of ‘‘woman’’ is to speak in terms of a male logic. It is by virtue of the ‘‘honors’’ denied her that woman acquires a liberational potency. Recalling the earlier observation that ‘‘the individual—the self—is man no longer credited with the magical power of representation’’ (51). is the double-bind of Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the place of woman within a masculine discourse of rationality—the impossibility of either agreeing or disagreeing with their assertions. one claims the authority of the very nonindividualized generality one seeks to deny. around what sort of categories could a ‘‘feminist philosophy’’ or a ‘‘feminist politics’’ orient itself? If the politics consists in a rejection of subjugation to the species. the masculine self-indictment of philosophy serves in fact—and despite itself—as a rear-guard action of precisely that phallocentric tradition which is supposedly under attack. By instrumenting a set of performative double-binds the text attempts to foreclose the possibility of a feminist philosophy. does that politics also entail both a negation of the conceptuality of philosophy and the disqualiﬁcation of any feminine collective? To question the necessity of so precipitous a retreat from whole realms of discursive practice is to raise the possibility that the assertion—by the male theoriests.’’ how is she to be theorized except in terms of that same male logic? In other words.76
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in a certain coercive rhetoric of assent. for example. Thus. This.

Let us reconstruct the general model of alienation. the escalation of domination into seamless power. and radically internalized in a ﬁnal stage that consists of man’s alienation from himself: ‘‘It is not merely that domination [Herrschaft] is paid for by the alienation of men from the objects dominated: with the objectiﬁcation of spirit. Beyond the difﬁculties involved in responding to Dialectic of Enlightenment—beyond the problem of speaking of ‘‘woman’’ at all in terms which are not always already compromised—there is the more fundamental question of the instrumentalization of woman within the discourse of the male Frankfurt School theorists. He knows them only in so far as he can manipulate them’’ (9). Man’s self-alienation marks the closure of the system. We can exempt her only by including her. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. however. First.’’ whose loss Horkheimer and Adorno otherwise deplore? But to valorize woman in this way again involves a performative contradiction. It marks the domination of the dominator by the very system which ensures his domination over others. cannot be thought simply as the alienation of an originally uniﬁed subject from him—or (still. in their alienation from Nature: ‘‘Men pay for the increase of their power [Macht] with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. This alienation. then: the subject-object relation is established with regard to external nature.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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power of representation. The question of women’s liberation is always subordinated to that of a more general human (that is. male) liberation at the same time as the inapplicability of such a model to women is taken as the cornerstone of that rather tenuous process of liberation. It can be asserted that woman is exempted from the masculine philosophical and representational dilemma only if we replay that gesture of denial which man practices upon woman. This structure is replicated at a second stage which involves man’s alienation from other men. by accepting the deﬁnition offered by the philosophical system from which she is to be excluded. Domination becomes total—becomes power—through alienation. the very relations of men— even those of the individual to himself—were bewitched’’ (28). Instrumentalization and reiﬁcation are the ﬁrst stages of the process. at this stage of the argument) herself—for it is only through this process of alienation that
. The movement from domination to power which I have isolated as a fundamental critical observation in Dialectic of Enlightenment can be traced through thee basic stages of alienation.

In this repressive identiﬁcation. Man does not dominate woman and identify her with nature—he dominates by identifying her with nature. Power is not simply represented—power is domination as representation. This is why the analysis of representation—and a critique of signiﬁcation—are so central to the pathology of power. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that: Man’s domination over himself. is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken. of course. The individual emerges only within a system of representation which he cannot control. would be that the domination of woman takes place by means of her identiﬁcation with nature. and dissolved by virtue of self-preservation is none other than that very life as functions of which the achievements of self-preservation ﬁnd their sole deﬁnition and determination. of course.4 Horkheimer and Adorno do not shy away from the fact that the identiﬁcation of woman and nature serves to subjugate woman at the ﬁrst stage of alienation. man does not simultaneously dominate nature and dominate woman and subsequently conﬂate the two in some form of metonymy of domination: to argue thus would be to underplay the role of representation in the genesis of power.78
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any such subject comes into existence. To assert that the domination of woman is the domination of nature is to accept—at some level—the very process of identiﬁcation (of woman and nature) which serves to dominate. for example—as Horkheimer and Adorno have already insisted—the identiﬁcation of woman and nature is a grounding commonplace in Western literary and philosophical discourse. In other words. This dialectic of subjectiﬁcation—the need to subjugate the self in order to become a subject—takes places both at the level of psyche and at the level of the individual’s relationship to the power of representation. But where do women feature in all of this? If. (54–55) Subject-oriented discourse is grounded upon the death of the subject it creates. which grounds his selfhood. suppressed. for the substance which is dominated. will be bound up the utopian instrumentalization of woman as the means of a (copulative) reconciliation with nature. But does this mean that woman (at least as an ideological
. then is the ﬁrst stage of alienation—man’s domination of nature—synonymous with man’s domination of woman? The problem with any such assertion.

that women’s oppression would need to be thought in terms of domination rather than power— poses. As the most casual critic of the power model might observe: it is all very well to talk of totalized power-structures. on the one hand. however. above all else.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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construct) never passes through the second and third stages of alienation which effect the shift from domination to power? This would mean. Power does not effact domination. on the other. but which does so only within a totalized model. and of racial equality both empowers and is empowered by the move beyond a purely economically-oriented model of domination. it has been the movement beyond the economic category of exploitation as the sole locus of political action. it simply ontologizes or abstracts it. However. Consequently. Whereas the politics of feminism. The second conclusion—namely.5 The problem with both these assumptions is that they accept. when nothing is being done about speciﬁc. in the name of woman. On the positive side. The question which poses itself is: whether ‘‘woman’s experience’’ retains any substantive value for Horkheimer and Adorno—as something speciﬁc—or whether it is not lost under the fetishization of experience itself (as a dwindling category)—whether it is not subsumed under that category of the speciﬁc which supposedly resists totalization. given the general entrenchment of a collusive system of power. to accept the extrapolation—from the alienation model— that the subject-object split is itself alien to feminine experience and then to orient a politics of feminism around this assertion would be both to accept—at another level—the identiﬁcation of woman and nature and to hypostatize a condition of ontologized feminine nondifferentiation as a political telos. doesn’t theory ﬁnd itself at odds hwere with the empirical movement of political outcome from the shift from a politics of domination to a politics of power. is it still possible to articulate a model of domination without seeming hopelessly inadequate theoretically? Moreover. questions of tactics. that women’s oppression would still need to be thought within the model of domination operative at the ﬁrst stage of alienation rather than within the subsequent model of power. of homosexual liberation. the ideological constructs of the philosophical tradition. that the subject-object split central to alienation would not be a feminine experience and. here we seem to be arguing that this analysis of power is actually alien to woman’s experience of domination. local domination. How. the persistence of a notion of domination does help to differentiate within the model of power. in focusing upon the category of (masculine)
.

and—as the wife’s secret collaborator—subjects it again to the order of possession: she sells pleasure. there can be no systematic way out of the totality of system. Moreover. woman is forcibly included in the general model. Men’s domination of women is viewed from the perspective of feminine self-alienation. That male-domination involves a certain self-immolation on the part of the male may well be true—very probably. the wife and the whore seem to be engaged in some kind of plot against the male—a plot to rob him of
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self-domination. For the reading I offer here. to read one’s way further into it. rather than an evaluation of the text as a programmatic political statement. Rather than expanding upon the ﬁgure of woman as a way out of the text. a reading of this text as a performance which is itself caught in the very psychosocial structures it takes as its object. Thus: Prostitute and wife are the complements of female self-alienation in the patriarchal world: the wife denotes pleasure in the ﬁxed order of life and property. for example. instead. (73–74) Woman’s labor as wife or whore is assimilated to the model of self-alienation implicit in all labor. it is—but the thrust of the argument here is to bypass man’s domination of woman in the rush to get at the crux of the issue. in other words. Horkheimer and Adorno ignore the persistence of outer-directed domination—man’s domination of woman. the ‘‘real’’ heart of the matter: man’s alienated domination of himself. what this involves is a closer engagement with the text as text. upon: ‘‘male domination. The central role played by the category of alienation (which I use here to characterize the completed third stage of the process) allows them to focus. to analyze some of the paradoxes which seem to have been embodied in the ﬁgure of woman. Within Dialectic of Enlightenment there seem to be two basic strategies for dealing with woman—models within which woman is presented less as the subject of experience than as a ﬁgure for experience itself. whereas the prostitute takes what the wife’s right of possession leaves free. In the ﬁrst instance. it ssems necessary. as a phenomenon threathened by the totalizing systems of power. among other things. Clearly. which—as a permanent deprivation of instinct—is nevertheless a symbolic self-mutilation on the part of the man’’ (72).

But now that a girl has the prospect of a job before her. collaborators in a patriarchy of which men seem to be the primary victims. the woman’s experience of power is mediated even in advanced industrial societies by the family. woman’s experience of domination within the patriarchal family actually serves a quasi-utopian function for Horkheimer and Adorno. In this case. is an imperfect model of social organization precisely because it leaves such ‘‘gaps. What is often seen as a nostalgia for patriarchy in Horkheimer and Adorno. It is an experience supposedly closed to men.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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pleasure. even though it was actually realized either in marriage or somewhere else outside. patriarchy is retained within capitalism. as it becomes aware of the incommensurability of patriarchal domination with the seamless power of capital. They are themselves. for whom power has always already displaced domination. in fact. At the same time as woman ﬁgures experience. Women—in accordance with their subjugation at the ﬁrst stage of alienation—experience domination.’’ As a social structure. not power. maintained in the young girl a notion of liberation. in which authority is asserted as straightforward domination. This tactic for the inclusion of women in the general schema is based entirely upon the perspective of male pleasure and deleterious effect of women upon it. however. an experience which capitalism closes off. marriage as a process of socialization might be taken as an allegory of sorts—an alle-
. however. Thus. The second attempt to account for the experience of women within the power model consists in tendentially excluding them from it. Since the experience of domination is crucial to break through the totalized non-experience of power. it seems.6 At the very least—we are given to understand—‘‘thralldom in her father’s house. But this often leads to such potentially conservative social positions as the observation that: ‘‘Before. thralldom in her father’s house would awaken an emotion in a girl which seemed to point to freedom. It is not difﬁcult to see what Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to articulate here—the opening and subsequent closure of pockets of resistance constituted by the anachronistic persistance of domination within the apparently seamless fabric of power. Patriarchy.’’ precisely because it was experienced as thralldom. is—in a sense—nostalgia for a system of domination in which injustice can be experienced—and resisted—as such. for example. It is the category of experience itself which is to be retained in and through ‘‘the feminine’’: and experience means pain. domination serves almost as a mark of privilege for the dominated. which only gradually displaces it. that of love is obstructed’’ (107).

it does so not within any given system of representation. Kuche as a blueprint for political liberation. that is. It is primarily in and through the reading of myth that this critique is implied. the project which seems to emerge from this analysis is woefully inadequate: Horkheimer and Adorno are not attempting to re¨ politicize Kinder. The ‘‘way out’’—which is really a ‘‘way in. The problem. in Horkheimer and Adorno’s presentation. Kirche. then. women merely liberate themselves into a more complex system of power. Politically. To reach this level of the text it is necessary to reconstruct an ethnology of sorts from within the analysis of the Odyssey. is that in liberating themselves from domination. it is a paradox—a complicity—neither Horkheimer and Adorno nor I can avoid. the political potential of woman in Dialectic of Enlightenment seems to reside in the very category of ‘‘experience’’ itself. The nondifferentiation of woman—that so-called
. of the passage of dominion into power.’’ a way into the very heart of representation—that Horkheimer and Adorno offer consists in articulating in and through the ﬁgure of woman a critique not only of the social relationships made possible within a certain system of representation but a critique of the representational system itself. as we have seen. At ﬁrst sight. power and alienation result from certain dialectical tensions already inherent in the model of domination and since—within the non-contemporaneous social organization of capitalism—women are still in a position to experience domination. however. they are. but rather as the narrative of a mythical succession of systems of representation. There is something paradoxical—or just plain complicitous—in offering a narrative of the emergence of narrative as the discursive form whereby patriarchy (and. so long as the ﬁgure of woman is accepted within a certain system of representation. it would seem. Again. Dialectic of Enlightenment does assess the stakes of persisting with narrative and even ﬂirts with the possibility of a ‘‘relapse’’ out of structured narrative. However. scientiﬁc discourse as its epitome) establishes dominance. and the closing of the possibility of ever conceptualizing oppression. In so far as Dialectic of Enlightenment does attempt to offer some kind of feminist counternarrative. Since. The aporias of their analysis only persist. presumably.82
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gory. In escaping from the home of her father into her own home as wife and mother. As an alternative to this second-order patriarchy the ‘‘prospect of a job’’ offers only direct socialization. the girl merely rejects direct domination by her father and ‘‘chooses’’ domination by the husband. in a position to short-circuit the escalation of domination into power. the (non)experience of power.

mimetic. It is also the state into which that logic fears it might slip: ‘‘The dread of losing the self and of abrogating altogether with the self the barrier between oneself and other life.’’ This threat is transformed into knowledge’s fear of a collapse back into ‘‘prehistoric myth. and it is possible to extrapolate the makings of a feminist critique of representation by interweaving this narrative with the analytic project of the ﬁrst chapter. Complicating the simple opposition of nature and culture as a way of carving up narrative. too. and metaphysical modes of behavior were taken as superseded eras. from mimesis to metaphysics. The fear of nondifferentiation.’’ It is a ‘‘healthy’’ and necessary fear of resubsumption in the mother. the annulment
. It is in this context that the Odyssey is read as an ethnology—as a history of social development and systems of representation. a fear of ‘‘mythic prehistory.’’ The analysis of the Odyssey begins by grounding the ethnological reading philologically: If we follow Kirchoff in his assumption that Odysseus’ visit to the Underworld belongs to the most ancient level of the epic—that of saga—it is this oldest layer. a fall into the feminine. any reversion to which was to be feared as implying a reversion of the self to that mere state of nature from which it had estranged itself with so huge an effort. Horkheimer and Adorno analyze instead a process of representational escalation: ‘‘One after the other. and which therefore struck terror into the self’’ (31). mythic. philosophy’s fear of ‘‘becoming-woman’’ is the same fear which drives us from one system of representation to another. that most decisively features (for example in the tradition of the visits of Heracles and Orpheus to the Underworld) something extending beyond myth: indeed. the theme of the forcing of the gates of hell. What Horkheimer and Adorno must attempt to problematize is that initial identiﬁcation of woman with the nondifferentiation of nature. which presents any falling away from dominant narrative structures as a fall into nature. This critique will—for Horkheimer and Adorno—take on the characteristics of ‘‘magic. the fear of death and destruction. Women are both that which threatens philosophy and philosophy’s ‘‘promesse de bonheur. is intimately associated [verschwistert] with a promise of happiness which threatened civilization in every moment’’ (33). from whose womb it tore itself’’ (32).A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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‘‘natural’’ state which in fact denaturizes her—is more than just a position assigned to women within a masculine logic.

the feminine must remain dumb. Magic too ‘‘pursues aims. if patriarchy goes hand in hand with disenchantment. The characterization of magic is highly complex. But what is magic? Dialectic of Enlightenment offers the following description: ‘‘On the magical plane. dream and image were not mere signs for the thing in question. antimythological and matriarchal. magic pursues aims. the earliest stage is prenarrative.’’ That which myth cannot accommodate it presents as silence and death. (76) The most ancient level of the epic is the visit to the underworld. In opposition to the patriarchal myth. and thus no alternative at all—but magic. So long as it is thought within myth. are ‘‘impotent. it is not enough to say that magic pursues its aims in a fundamentally different—‘‘mimetic’’— way. however. Mimesis will even prove
. not by progressively distancing itself from the object’’ (11). but were bound up with it by similarity of names. Like science. On the one hand. it would seem. Magic. is the name of a certain form of representation. Instrumental cognition of the world involves a distantiation and objectiﬁcation. Consequently. In other words. perhaps. there is an insistence upon distinction—the individualization. blind and dumb. we should command her by action’’ (4). The relation is not one of intention but of relatedness. Furthermore. it will subsequently be quite speciﬁcally the mimetic ‘‘concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things’’ which will be criticized as ‘‘patriarchal’’ (4). but seeks to achieve them by mimesis.’’ Moreover.84
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of death constitutes the very core of all antimythological thinking. whereas ‘‘the world of magic retained distinctions whose traces have disappeared even in linguistic form’’ (10). It is important to note—and this has been often overlooked by an overemphasis upon instrumental reason as the key to the critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment—that magic is differentiated from science not by virtue of its opposition to purposive rationality. Even Bacon implicitly invokes mimesis when observing that: ‘‘now we govern nature in opinions. the ‘‘souls which the adventurer sees on his ﬁrst visit to the realm of the dead are primarily the matriarchal images banished by the religion of light’’ (75). And. but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention. The images encountered in Hades. which men deny women. then this must simultaneously entail a disempowering of the feminine. as Horkheimer and Adorno also point out. Horkheimer and Adorno propose not matriarchy—an alternative mythology. it would seem.

that is. Put differently. it is important to exercise a little caution and to question what is involved in this speciﬁc form of representation. for: ‘‘the ratio which supplants mimesis is not simply its counterpart. as a model of nondifferentiation within the sign itself. Once again. As a model of representation. the cow. as the elision of signiﬁer into signiﬁed? And if this is the case. it should be noted that the symbolic can be articulated at all only once it has been manipulated by mythic
. at least. or the egg. the sacriﬁcial animal is massacred instead of the god’’ (10). on ﬁrst hearing. Matriarchal myths of creation are symbolic—and the symbolic is the medium of magic. for an aesthetic. After all. there may be grounds.’’ a metonymic motivation of the sign. There is. that is. something scandalous about the symbolic—it is the voice of the muted feminine: ‘‘The representations [Darstellungen] of creation in which the world comes forth from the primal mother. or a rethinking of representation. that is. First and foremost.7 The question remains. hair or name. perhaps the aesthetic might provide the grounds for a feminist politics. it is itself mimesis: mimesis unto death’’ (57). it is the fracturing of the conventional relationship of signiﬁer and signiﬁed which constitutes magic—a so-called ‘‘relation of relatedness. therefore: what is speciﬁc about magic? One can only answer by an apparent tautology—what is speciﬁc about magic is its speciﬁcity! The speciﬁcity. of magical representation—the nondifferentiated reasserts itself as the conﬂation of signiﬁer and signiﬁed. What happens to the enemy’s spear. however. The text’s subsequent mutation of magic into a somewhat vaguely developed notion of ‘‘the symbolic’’ seems to bear out these fears. If there is no ground here for a speciﬁcally feminist or ‘‘feminine’’ politics. then. the privileging of the aesthetic throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment is likewise legitimated by the assertion made in the ﬁrst chapter that the ‘‘work of art still has something in common with enchantment’’ (19). also happens to the individual. But how does it function? First of all. are Horkheimer and Adorno not guilty of a regression—albeit on a more sophisticated level—to that practice of domination which ﬁgures woman as nondifferentiation? In the very midst of speciﬁcity—the speciﬁcity. the ‘‘relation of relatedness’’ seems merely to hypostatize that image of woman as nondifferentiation which the Enlightenment itself perpetrates. Is magic simply being offered as a model of insigniﬁcance.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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itself to be the principle of the very rationality which supposedly displaces it. of its mode of representation: ‘‘In magic there is speciﬁc representation [Vertrebarkeit]. are symbolic—unlike the Jewish genesis’’ (17).

What is being stressed in the symbolic is the nondifferentiation of reality and representation. (17) The symbolic would seem to be a form of representation which ‘‘bears witness’’—it is pictorial and is likened to the hieroglyph. Myth is not simply the signiﬁcation of an autonomously self-repetitive nature—it is the repetition of nature in mimetic. this is how the symbolic represents. undifferentiated. so the word too originally had a pictorial function. a part of the ancient nostos—which usurps the symbolic. Here we clearly hear echoes of that magical relation of relatedness: Just as hieroglyphs bear witness [bezeugen]. unending renewal and the permanence of the signiﬁed are not mere attributes of all symbols. but what does it represent? ‘‘Like magical rites. So. as an historical transition crucial to the emergence of the dominant patriarchal discourse. Once a place is assigned to the symbolic—and the feminine—within myth. Rather than opposing myth. woman no
. which was transferred to myths. it becomes through mimesis nature itself—nature in its self-repetition. What is supposedly ‘‘the core of the symbolic’’— repetition—signiﬁes within the mythic the possibility of mere tautology. ‘‘sign and image were one’’—that is. which is the core of the symbolic: a state of being or a process that is presented as eternal. the matriarchal is ﬁgured as antimythological. which is the core of the symbolic. the symbolic—offered as a short-circuiting of signiﬁcation—ﬁnally serves to ground that form of self-identity which is at the heart of logos. because it incessantly becomes actual once more by being realized in symbolic form. The core of the symbolic is self-repetitive nature. narrative form. Mythic mimesis is the repetition of self-repeating nature. In it. Thus: ‘‘The doctrine of the priests was symbolic in the sense that in it sign and image were one’’ (17). myths signify self-repetitive nature.’’ Horkheimer and Adorno have observed. ‘‘myths signify self-repetitive nature. nor within an idealizing tradition which would hypostatize the reality of the concept.’’ The symbolic seems to function as the catalyst for the taking up of magic into myth. though not in the sense of a manipulative Baconian ‘‘concordance’’ of mind and matter. Like magical rites. the symbolic seems to reach through it toward the systematicity of administered truth. remember. But there is something about myth—and.86
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religion. Inexhaustibility. That is to say. That is to say. but their essential content.

is no guarantee of truth. It is not. yet in it domination is not yet negated by transforming itself into the pure truth and acting as the very ground of the world that has become subject to it’’ (9).’’ we are told. The same gesture which establishes discursive logic—namely the ability to displace in its entirety one thing by another. The experience of domination. and the lamb for the ﬁrst-born. is raised in sacriﬁce. It is this instrumentalization of the category of the symbolic which Horkheimer and Adorno are at pains to resist by insisting upon the speciﬁcity of signiﬁcation in magic. the individual to the species. self-repetitive nature gives rise to a logocentric model of tautologous truth. and magic instituted within a systematic discursive context is magic no longer. Magic as a speciﬁc instance of speciﬁc representation becomes what Horkheimer and Adorno call ‘‘sacriﬁce’’: ‘‘Substitution [Substitution] in the course of sacriﬁce marks a step toward discursive logic. ‘‘Magic. or a thing by a word—sets a paradigm for the subjugation of women under the rule of the general. a moment in which representation becomes repetition. and so forth). they already represented the species. on the one hand.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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longer threatens anything more than an impossible self-fulﬁllment of the signifying system. stil had to have speciﬁc qualities. a coincidence that the ﬁrst example of sacriﬁce is the offering of the hind for the daughter—for what is sacriﬁced in sacriﬁce is the speciﬁcity of a feminized magical representation. however. perhaps. A woman can no longer even be sacriﬁced—what is sacriﬁced is her speciﬁcity. This is the sense in which mimesis feeds into rationality—the mimetic repetition functions as the supplement to selfrepeating nature. Even though the hind offered up for the daughter. This invocation of magic as an experience of domination which does not seek to legitimate domination as truth is obviously reminiscent of the status accorded women throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment. If. In sparing the woman and
. the insistence upon the speciﬁcity of the magical also feeds into a similar form of self-sublation. The speciﬁcity of the sacriﬁcial object—that which makes it ‘‘unﬁt for exchange’’—is always already the speciﬁcity of exchange. The entire feminine problematic of the relationship of the speciﬁc to the general. ‘‘is utterly untrue. They already exhibited the non-speciﬁcity [Beliebigkeit] of the example’’ (10). a moment of completion and perfect mimesis in which the signiﬁer-signiﬁed difference is elided. the speciﬁcity of that which has replaced (as sacriﬁcial signiﬁer) the signiﬁed which is to be spared (the hind for the daughter.

’’ The speciﬁcity of the feminine seems to be conserved. we sacriﬁce women to the realm of discursivity and to nonspeciﬁcity. but rather that which grounds it—either as its other or as its essence. they will subsequently argue in their reading of the Odyssey that: ‘‘If barter [Tausch] is the secular form of sacriﬁce. in the hic et nunc of experience—but in the discursive marking of the here and now. Thus. and makes it unﬁt for exchange’’ (10).’’ that is. then. Ritual is still.’’ There is no speaking of the ‘‘here and now’’—outside of the here and now itself—except as ‘‘there and then. The speciﬁcity operative within the system of magical signiﬁcation—that is. a threshold experience. the feminine has become not that which is excluded from masculine philosophical discourse. into the discourse of the ‘‘other.88
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sacriﬁcing the hind. If ritual sacriﬁce is the sacriﬁce of woman—as
. This notion of the hic et nunc grounds the speciﬁcity of the magical and of the aesthetic also. the notion of ritual sacriﬁce is the key to understanding not only the establishing of a certain philosophical tradition. In a sense. but also of speciﬁc social and economic relations. for: ‘‘the holiness of the hic et nunc. there is an inevitable shift into the register of ‘‘then and there. What Horkheimer and Adorno ﬁnally reach is a double bind in respect of philosophy’s ability—or inability—to think ‘‘the feminine. however. a device of men by which the gods may be mastered: the gods are overthrown by the very system by which they are honored’’ (49). radically marks it off. On the other hand. It is clear that for Horkheimer and Adorno. That Horkheimer and Adorno should refer to the sacriﬁcial object as ‘‘unﬁt for exchange’’ serves as some indication of the direction in which they wish to develop this analysis of forms of representation. as a semiotic—has been displaced onto the context. on the one hand. but can do so only within the institutionalized limits of a structured public sphere. the uniqueness of the chosen one into which the representative enters. the latter already appears as the magical pattern of rational exchange. It is not yet fully rationalized. to insist upon the speciﬁcity of the representation of self-repetitive nature serves only to ground—as the virtual goal of logocentric discourse—the rhetorical formula of truth as tautology: philosophy as the self-repetition of nature.’’ The speciﬁcity of context is necessarily de-differentiated within the philosophical text. Sacriﬁce stands as a link between an analysis of models of representation and a critique of the relations of exchange intrinsic to capitalism.

If the notion of a premythic. ‘‘the civilized marriage with Penelope. Women only seem to ﬁgure either—as in the case of Penelope—as the guardians of a patriarchal order vacated by the patriarch. in Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey. it is not really necessary to trace here in detail Horkheimer and Adorno’s ethnological reading of the Odyssey. represents a later stage of the objectivity of the patriarchal order’’ (72). ﬁnally. The speciﬁcity of a woman would be possible only in her death. nevertheless. peacefully growing old together. Capitalism. Wife and whore are more than just valorizations of woman within the patriarchal narrative—they are fundamental to its very discursive organization. and even hunting. Thus. to the rebellious daughter who chooses married servitude over paternal domination. We have returned. it is observed that: ‘‘Even if the contract between the partners only calls down that age-old enmity. logocentrism. or—as in the case of Circe—as ﬁgures of historical regression and oblivion. perhaps. they can vanish at the same moment like Philemon and Baucis: just as the smoke of the sacriﬁcial altar turns into the wholesome smoke of the ﬁreside’’ (75). patriarchal marriage—all seem the outcome of ritual sacriﬁce. it would seem. When Penelope suggests that marriage—as a promise of permanence—brings down the wrath of the gods. That such a reading of sacriﬁce can be pursued directly into a critique of social and economic relations under capitalism is indicated by subsequent invocations of the hic et nunc of sacriﬁce within Dialectic of Enlightenment. and the lack of any systematic organization of labor’’ (64)—and. through the savagery of the lotus-eaters— who represent the nostalgia for ‘‘a stage more ancient than agriculture. than all production’’ (63). Having isolated the moment of sacriﬁce as a turning point in the philosophical representation and social encoding of woman. in fact. sacriﬁced to categoriality.’’ which ‘‘while older in literary terms. From here develops the barbarism of the cyclops—‘‘deﬁned as the absence of any systematic agriculture. cattle-rearing. older. sacriﬁced as speciﬁcity.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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speciﬁcity—then it is a sacriﬁce made at the twin altars of capitalism and philosophy. a sacriﬁce in which the speciﬁc woman is spared: spared as woman. It is a reading which establishes a continuum from premythic matriarchy. for example. for example—it is clear that a critique of
. in her sacriﬁce—or in her silencing—hence the mythicized silence of the dead matriarchs of Hades. prepatriarchal order is raised—through the feminine ﬁgures of Hades. it is speciﬁcally the role of the wife which is linked to the nodal moment of sacriﬁce.

nondifferentially. Consequently we must refrain from locating woman at any stage of the continuum—within a matriarchy. for example. any reversion to which was to be feared as implying a reversion of the self to that mere state of nature from which it had estranged itself with so huge effort. and to masculine pleasure. to the nondifferentiated. In fundamentally opposing ways. and metaphysical modes of behavior were taken as superseded eras. The threat of nondifferentiation posed by Circe ‘‘constitutes the nature of promiscuity’’ (69). the threat posed by these two ﬁgures to the hegemony of male pleasure is one in which ‘‘the wife denotes pleasure in the ﬁxed order of life and property. we are told. mythic. and which therefore struck terror into the self’’ (31). a deconstructive—principle.’’ of regression. Woman as regression becomes a structural—or. perhaps. Nondifferentiation and sexual indifference are conﬂated. which designates her. The one (Circe) represents the threat of historical ‘‘failure.’’ The joint analyses of marriage as a development of the sacriﬁcial mode of representation and of masculine discourse as an effacement of woman and of speciﬁcity meet in Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of post-
. Woman is dangerous both to progress and narrative. The principle of nondifferentiation assigned to woman within masculine discourse—the nondifferentiation. as woman—makes of Circe a prostitute. Women seem to challenge a speciﬁcally masculine ‘‘pleasure of the text. The easy incorporation of Penelope (‘‘older in literary terms’’) into the fabric of the myth indicates the way in which any such return might be preempted. Penelope and Circe—both threaten the temporality of narrative. and—as the wife’s secret collaborator—subjects it again to the order of possession’’ (74).90
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patriarchal mythic structures cannot be articulated as a return to an earlier stage. which consistently thwarts or threatens linear progress. while the other (Penelope) is the threat of fulﬁllment—an end of history in the sense of history’s self-fulﬁllment— history’s return home. that is. Woman as historical regression is already located outside of the process of rationalization being described in this text. Again. whereas the prostitute takes what the wife’s right of possession leaves free. To think woman as a stage of a process is problematic because it is precisely this form of thinking which leads us to give content to a purely formal fear of regression and to identify woman with that to which we might regress—that is. To return to the passage quoted earlier: ‘‘One after the other. mimetic. the two female ﬁgures central to Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the ‘‘civilized’’ discourse of the Odyssey—the wife and the whore.

in which ‘‘there is no speciﬁc representation. which men call truth. simply identiﬁed with the virtuous wife. then. but generation.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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Baconian science. . Bacon reinscribes himself within the discourse of the wife—and the problem of scientiﬁc knowledge is presented as a marital drama. On the one hand we have the fruitful wife (nature. It is an epistemological love-triangle consisting of the false wife of ‘‘vain notions and blind experiments. so to speak—would seem to be the ideal. and not for fruit or generation’’ (5). it is not hard to consider’’ (3). the completion of the scientiﬁc project. Horkheimer and Adorno paraphrase Bacon’s logic as follows: ‘‘Not ‘satisfaction.’’ And yet at the same time the ‘‘businesss’’ of the courtesan must be rejected.’’ can be traced back to this unfortunate ´ mesalliance between ‘‘the mind of man’’ and ‘‘vain notions and blind experience.’’ merely ‘‘universal interchangeability’’ (10). Bacon himself views the epistemological project of his science as an essentially ‘‘matrimonial’’ affair. ‘‘knowledge that tendeth but to satisfaction. as Horkheimer and Adorno observe: ‘‘For Bacon as for Luther. for it is not truth in any abstract or absolute sense which is at stake for Bacon. But the situation is rather more complicated. the absence of ‘‘posterity and issue. And between them is that troublesome marriage of inconvenience with vain experiment. Lack of progress. At this point the rhetoric of the Odyssey and the rhetoric of modern science coalesce.’ is the ‘right mark’ ’’ . in which it is important to isolate and do away with ‘‘the things which have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things. For there is another woman on the scene. the opposition of wife and whore is not represented—as one might have expected—as an opposition of truth and falsehood. We seem to be caught between the epistemological and
. is but as a courtesan. (5).’’ the ideal wife of nature.’’ Marriage—the return home to Penelope. married to the mind of man). The opposition of wife and whore is not. then. a simple one. which is on the side of the wife—in other words.’’ Furthermore. Indeed. on the other the courtesan. whose greatest wish is to bring about the ‘‘happy match between the mind of man and the [presumably feminine] nature of things.’ ‘to do the business. which is for pleasure. but rather something more functional—a (pro)creativity for which he uses the term ‘‘business. no less.’’ Bacon is a marriage-broker. and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments: and what the posterity and issue of so honorable a match may be. Truth is not. It is not truth. meant for pleasure. productivity. and the courtesan of ‘‘mere satisfaction.’ but ‘operation. . not procreation.

Indeed. is a consistent picture of the simultaneous hypostatization and repression of the notion of ‘‘woman’’ in the realms of political. scientiﬁc. by daring to pose any alternative. for all its critique. to the critique of representation itself. The similarity of terms obliges us. in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. the realm of the courtesan. nevertheless. and
. it is necessary to follow the thread of argumentation back to the most fundamental level. plays the courtesan.’’ when they insist that: ‘‘The separation of sign and image is irremediable. then. ‘‘Truth’’ has become a luxury. to ask ourselves whether Horkheimer and Adorno are themselves implicated in precisely the terminological oppositions they oppose in Bacon. Horkheimer and Adorno are. In pursuing the analysis of systems of representation. To understand the totalizing value of the critique. economic. then each of the two isolated principles tend toward the destruction of truth’’ (18). The question remains. The function of the mother and wife— withdrawn from the business transactions of the courtesan—is. Dialectic of Enlightenment threatens to erect an equally repressive model. more worthy of note is precisely the way in which woman seems to function as a utopian ﬁgure. any attempt to rethink the relationship of sign and image. In the equivocation of wife and whore what is being constructed—and. rejected—is nothing less than the Eros of knowledge. it seems. in brief. the feminist critic. Dialectic of Enlightenment is far from being a programmatic text— and it should not be surprising that on the issue of a potential liberation of ‘‘woman’’ it has little to offer by way of direct political proposals. the type of business Bacon has in mind. whether Horkheimer and Adorno move beyond the instrumentalization of woman within their own analysis. however. Could it be that. however. As critics of the Baconian tradition. between patriarchy and science. What emerges from Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis in Dialectic of Enlightenment. This thesis is worked out speciﬁcally with reference to the category of the ‘‘symbolic. pointing—at least—the way beyond the aporetic constructions of the dominant philosophical discourse. adamant that there can be no way out by means of a historical regression. and if so what implications this has for both their analysis and for a feminist reading of that analysis. in which truth takes the place of Baconian efﬁcacy? The ‘‘mere satisfaction’’ of Bacon’s courtesan is replayed in the ‘‘unconscious selfsatisfaction’’ which marks. mere satisfaction. Should unconscious self-satisfaction cause it once again to become hypostatized. and religious discourse. I think.92
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the economic consequences of the wife-whore opposition—caught.

The very process of internalization whereby direct socialization becomes possible is itself structurally determined by the patriarchal or Oedipal family. It is not. The act of internalization is. By this criterion. an experience of domination—is valorized only in so far as it is an experience closed to the directly socialized male. As Jessica Benjamin has pointed out in her sympathetic but thorough critique of Horkheimer and Adorno. It is valorized. As a cipher for the speciﬁc. The analysis of power—prompted by the experience of consensual domination in both fascism and capitalism—serves only to strengthen this critical tendency. in fact. The daughter’s experience of domination is a case in point. woman is once again denied speciﬁcity. Central to the analysis is not the experience of the womoan. the privilege of ‘‘experience’’ itself—even if it is experience as pain. Convinced that the repressed can be liberated only as the repressed. Dialectic of Enlightenment would be a failure in almost every respect. an act
. Instead. even if patriarchy itself has had to yield to a more thoroughgoing rationalization on the basis of economic performativity. a question of chastizing Horkheimer and Adorno for failing to articulate a coherent and practicable political project. from a male perspective. Horkheimer and Adorno had great difﬁculties in creating from the ‘‘repressed’’ a potential subject position not deﬁned purely in terms of its objectiﬁcation by the dominant discourse. then. The problem lies in the perspective from which the dilemma of ‘‘woman’’ is presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In other words. the pressing concern is to recognize the ways in which it is in and through the ﬁgure of ‘‘woman’’ that this analysis both marks its difference from and asserts its complicity with the object of its critique. but the patriarchal construct within which it becomes potentially subversive. an obsession with the structures of patriarchy actually serves to blind Horkheimer and Adorno to strategies of liberation which might escape the social parameters dictated by those structures. the empirical decline of the family as an economic—and therefore ideological—determinant by no means results in the emergence of a ‘‘society without fathers.’’8 A society characterized by what Horkheimer and Adorno would term ‘‘direct socialization’’ is by no means incompatible with the structure of patriarchy.A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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whether they do not—as I have indicated at key points—replicate at a more sophisticated level that denial of the ‘‘honor of individualization’’ practiced both practically and theoretically upon women. The ‘‘speciﬁcity’’ of the experience—its value to the woman—is secondary to its fantasmatic utopian value to the male theorist. that is.

for example— must be examined not simply as subject-oriented psychoanalytic models. Such would be the true challenge of a ‘‘feminine’’ dialectic of enlightenment. and speciﬁcity of experience itself becomes a paradoxical panacea—a general solution to the totalizing tendencies of the dominant masculine discourse. 1970). It must be emphasized
. Carfagno (New York: Farrar. which demand a rethinking of the possibilities not only of a utopian experience. ‘‘work with the existing repertory of cultural imagery—not because they either lack originality or criticize it—but because their subject. Instead. such has not been our objective here. but as complex textual models. it becomes incumbent upon us to analyze not only the (potentially anachronistic) psychical structures—the languages of the subject—which serve to (dis)locate women in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. and symbolic structures within and by which the notion of ‘‘the feminine’’ can be articulated. 2. trans. linguistic. At the same time. who. Given Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic analysis of the dwindling possibilities for the subject. John Cumming (New York: Continuum. Thus. Strategically. Reich’s work also sought to legitimate methodologically a move beyond Marxist economism and into the realm of mass-psychology by examining the disparity between the emergence of a dominant petty bourgeois ‘‘character structure’’ unsupported by economic power. a representation of difference. in the words of Craig Owens. it is a question of understanding the ways in which the text—for all its awareness of the instrumentalization of women—cannot break out of that instrumental rationality.94
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of compensation through which the loss of a familial mediation is made good. Vincent R. Straus. the shift from an analysis of domination to an analysis of power can already be perceived in works like Wilhelm Reich’s. The Mass-Psychology of Fascism. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1987). would lead us to a fundamental critique of the psychoanalytic models underlying Dialectic of Enlightenment. however. feminine sexuality. 1969). Giroux. Where the possibility for any terminological confusion arises in ¨ translation. I have chosen to insert (in brackets) the original German from Dialektik der Aufklarung: Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. See for example Wilhelm Reich. my position is not dissimilar from that of certain ‘‘postmodern’’ feminist artists. Adorno. but of experience and its representation.
Notes
1. Women— as the bearers of speciﬁcity—are never considered as a potential social and political collective. is always constituted in and as representation. 3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. The utopian communicative categories so often identiﬁed in the text with woman—magic. Such questions. but also to trace the social. trans.

Hal Foster (Port Townsend. so false projection makes the surrounding world like itself. Parveen Adams. they investigate what representation does to women. for instance. Perhaps the most fascinating such analysis is to be found in Jean-Joseph Goux.’’ ‘‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism. and ﬁnally to an inclusive reciprocity with the other nature. Benhabib attempts to place Adorno within an Enlightenment continuum of theories of autonomy. such a position might lead toward the position of. 6. comprises a multiphased shift from inclusion in nature as mother. (165)
. For the purposes of the reading I propose here. For this reason much has been written on the topic. to Adorno’s own mimetic project. ‘‘Adorno distinguishes between a relation to otherness that acknowledges otherness and a relation to otherness that imitates without acknowledgment’’ (219). The point I wish to make here. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. if for it the stranger becomes familiar. At the level of psychology. human history through the present has been limited to the history of man: history is masculine’’ (241).A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?
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that these artists are not primarily interested in what representations say about women. The original German original makes clear what the translation only implies. however. and censorship an experience of domination. via the technology of death. The ambiguities of mimesis are themselves a function of the dialectic of Enlightenment for Benhabib (who observes no real discontinuity in the mimetic project from Dialectic of Enlightenment to Negative Dialectics). mimesis itself colludes in a system of domination—as in the case of Bacon. Quoting Adorno. Clearly. ed. Western reason. 7. succeeds in making otherness disappear. the natural condition to which the self regresses is corrupted by civilization itself’’ (209). however. 4. and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press. concerns not the realization of desire.’’ Critique. less repressed than that of a man. ‘‘Autonomy as Mimetic Reconciliation. which moves from the Kantian notion of self-legislation. through a separation. She writes: ‘‘Under the conditions of civilization. which originates in the mimetic act to master otherness by becoming like it. the category of mimesis is both crucial and eternally problematic in any consideration of Adorno’s project of reconciliation. In other words. however.’’ 5. namely that ‘‘[f]eminine eroticism is more censored. through Hegelian and Marxist models of self-actualization. Space does not permit me to examine the broader ramiﬁcations of the implication of the idealist philosophical tradition in notions of sexual difference. Norm. 1983). no. wherein even the self becomes other. mimesis does not reveal the afﬁnity of the self with nature. In an analysis which parallels the more limited textual reading offered here. In this book. Goux argues that ‘‘[i]f the phylogenetic odyssey of libidinal positions of knowledge. through which social access to reality is gained. the most pertinent analysis is found in Seyla Benhabib. 71. 167). 1990).’’ Repression here would be a collusive strategy of power. that Horkheimer and Adorno are acutely aware of the social mediation of any such heterosexual historical phylogenesis in such institutions as marriage and remain skeptical of any real social reconciliation with nature. If for the former the exterior is the model which the interior has to approximate [sich anschmiegen]. any return to Marxian ‘‘natural history. which—by virtue of its very respect for otherness—potentially mutates either into a process of self-alienation. or into a murderous attack upon the other as such: ‘‘If mimesis makes itself like the surrounding world. rather. culminates in an act of projection which. Semiotext(e) 4. As Benhabib points out.’’ The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. she locates the dialectic within the ambiguity of mimesis itself.: Bay Press. which is ‘‘intended to anticipate a new nondominating mode of relation to inner and external nature’’ (11). ‘‘An Inquiry into Femininity.’’ trans. but the very possibility of its being experienced as desire. It should be noted. 1986). ` Michele Montrelay. Wash. 1 (1981): 228. the latter transforms the tense inside reality to snap into exteriority and stamps even the familiar as the enemy’’ (DE. 186–223. namely that the girl’s desire for freedom was never fulﬁlled: ‘‘erfullte sie sich weder in der Ehe noch irgendwo draus¨ sen’’ (115).

1949). Erich Mosbacher (London: Tavistock. See also Jessica Benjamin.’’ New German Critique 41 (Spring–Summer 1987). The most recent contribu¨ tion to this tradition would be Klaus Theweleit’s Mannerphantasien. and to Max Horkheimer. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper. Any comprehensive analysis of the psychoanalytic question as it relates speciﬁcally to questions of ‘‘the feminine’’ from within the problematic of the Frankfurt School would necessarily address the entire oeuvre of writers and thinkers such as Fromm. See also Nancy Love. ‘‘Authority and the Family Revisited: or. Nietzsche. ‘‘Authority and the Family Today. Benjamin is building. Society Without the Father: A Contribution to Social Psychology. 1969).
. ‘‘The End of Internalization: Adorno’s Social Psychology. and Marcuse. 359–74. upon a long tradition of work addressing the question of the subject in its relation to both patriarchy and capitalism. of course.96
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8. Jessica Benjamin. and Critical Theory. ed. Speciﬁcally. A World Without Fathers?’’ New German Critique 13 (Winter 1978): 35–37. ‘‘Epistemology and Exchange: Marx.’’ Telos 32 (Summer 1977): 42–64. she is responding to Alexander Mitscherlich. trans.’’ The Family: Its Function and Destiny. Reich.

In the light of world historical injustice. ‘‘There is no way out of entanglement’’ (27). is certainly no less clear. However. or even literary. although perhaps less familiar.5
‘‘No Happiness Without Fetishism’’
Minima Moralia as Ars Amandi
Eva Geulen
Theodor Adorno’s greatest success is a book on failure. for example. dignity. in which he famously decreed that ‘‘there is no right life in the wrong one. the categorical impossibility of any ‘‘right life’’ brings to the surface those mundane details of daily life that usually fall below the threshold of philosophical.’’1 Numerous formulations play on Minima Moralia’s pervasive theme of inevitable failure. The dictate ‘‘no way out’’ discloses a negative freedom in its own right. Minima Moralia is also Adorno’s most intimate book. Adorno seems to be able to
.

But Adorno’s concern with individual experience also increases the level of exposure.6 Yet the reasonable suggestion to forego further examination of the ‘‘somatic’’ underpinnings of Adorno’s thought runs the risk of castrating the entire oeuvre. Not much can be said in defense of Adorno’s anachronistic sentimentality. For none of Adorno’s theorems—neither those pertaining to art and aesthetic experience or to history and social relations. for example. according to which ‘‘the private is the political. even therefore) it is likely that many a line from Minima Moralia has found its way into lovers’ discourse. Clemens Pornschlegel heaped ridicule on the entry titled ‘‘Constanze. the majority of lucid professionals have long since unmasked Adorno’s notoriously romanticizing speculations and banned them accordingly. .3 The somewhat dated slogan.4 Most recently. 19th century through and through.98
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afford a worldliness that is missing in most of his other writings. In contradistinction to those few readers who are acutely in love. Minima Moralia proves to be a particularly rich. ‘‘because even thought’s remotest objectiﬁcations are nourished by the drives’’ (122).’’5 Indeed.’’ can hardly legitimize prolonged indulgence in Adorno’s rather ubiquitous romantic musings. . On the pain and glory of love. Albrecht Wellmer. and particularly embarrassing. Nietzsche’s claim that ‘‘the degree and kind of a man’s sexuality extends to the highest pinnacle of his spirit’’ ﬁgured among Adorno’s deepest
. he so unabashedly assumes the point of view of a male heterosexual that this perspective tends to cloud even his once poignant insights into the dialectics of the women’s movement. nowhere else is he more vulnerable to critique and ridicule. among the entries of Minima Moralia readers may hope to ﬁnd something appropriate for any occasion. Moreover. the pitfalls of the so-called sexual revolution. stigmatized what he termed Adorno’s ‘‘somatic’’ tendencies as remnants of dubious theologisms that ought to be surrendered. and other potentially redeeming features of his thoughts on love in particular and gender relations in general. nor those addressing problems of literary or musical expression—can be sustained at all if their roots in erotic desire are severed. Nevertheless (and.’’ which portrays the loving couple as a dormant revolutionary cell: ‘‘Perhaps the secret of success of the young republic’s bestselling author is nowhere more graspable than in his sentimental lines on love .2 As with any good vade mecum. A proposition such as ‘‘You are being loved only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength’’ (192) strikes just the right balance between banality and profundity that is required of such tokens of love. perhaps. source.

As the beloved image transforms itself. Adorno’s description of the successful artwork as a ﬂeeting instance of Einstand. in the ﬁnal instance. is intentionless.’’ between utmost tension and complete relaxation also borrows its evidence from the same phenomenon. the momentary equilibrium of opposites is precisely at issue here. The very idea of happiness. Even ecstasy requires distance: ‘‘Contemplation without violence. aesthetic experience resembles sexual experience. reducible to sexual desire or sexual fulﬁllment. has a stable and valid idea of truth’’ (61). as petriﬁcation is united with the most vivacious.’’ Yet dismissing Adorno’s persistent allusions as mere ﬂourishes on hard-core theory obviously sells short what is overrated in the other scenario. who observes the rare coincidence of tension with its opposite. in particular its culmination. And mapping Adorno’s obstinate references onto a grand theory of desire (Lacanian. (But it is worth pointing out that on Adorno’s view.) The point of these and countless other examples is not that Adorno’s theoretical constructions are.
. for example) clearly misses the point as well. It belongs to the onlooker. The problem is that the sphere of sexuality has been so greatly expanded as to become an enveloping presence.’’7 The succession of mutually canceling terms in this sentence—‘‘as if’’ (gleichsam) but ‘‘incarnate’’ (leibhaft). or ‘‘balance. satisfying the ultimate intention. strained references to utopia tend to be modeled on sexual fulﬁllment: ‘‘Only he who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure. it has become so diffuse as to saturate virtually everything.8 Equally crude would be an interpretation that casts sexual pleasure as the last bastion of resistance within the ‘‘totally administered world. Similarly. it is as if culmination were the incarnation of the original idea of aesthetic experience. In particular. respectively.‘‘No Happiness Without Fetishism’’
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convictions (122). then in this respect. his scant. In fact. Sexuality’s impotent omnipotence in Minima Moralia is intriguing enough to tempt one to experiment with a more systematic reconstruction of its theoretical signiﬁcance. presupposes that he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself: a distanced nearness’’ [89–90]. yet inaccessible and unveriﬁable as a platonic idea (Urbild) at the same time—underwrite Adorno’s determined refusal to let anyone decide whether this ‘‘culmination’’ should be understood literally or ﬁguratively. which. his most succinct formula for the speciﬁc quality of aesthetic experience unequivocally recalls the peculiarities of ‘‘la petite mort’’: ‘‘If anywhere. Adorno suggests. an orgasm is not privy to the pleasure he likens to aesthetic experience. is ‘‘sexual union’’ as ‘‘blissful tension’’ (217). the source of all the joy of truth.

but ‘‘rather because he rejects the end. was abandoned. on the border. one of the thorniest theorems in his aesthetic theory. on the one hand. Against the backdrop of that hypothetical premise it becomes possible to measure the familiar against the unfamiliar. remote from meaning. Freudian. a site of great ambivalence. or remains. This latter aspect helps to account for the fact that a passage in Minima Moralia joins mimetic heritage and love in the name of humanity: ‘‘The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only be-
.11 On the other hand. Adorno plants himself ﬁrmly on ‘‘this side of the pleasure principle. a quasi-anthropological constant in all his reﬂections. hesitating. mimesis belongs to an archaic level of experience that reason and abstraction have long overcome—at least this is how the story of mimesis is told in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. love in Adorno tends to appear in the context of mimesis. One best proceeds as if Adorno had left us with a fully developed theory of love. Where Freud hovers. to be reasonable: pleasure [Lust]’’ (61). for either historical or structural reasons. where the Jewish imposition of the taboo on images thwarts the regressive tendencies of mimetic impulses. pervious to reason. Rather than exhaustively cataloging all references to sexuality—and who is to say what qualiﬁes in this respect?—one should understand that eclecticism is key. or even clash with the accustomed theoretical paradigms of his thought: Nietzschean. reason.9 From this follows the method: to pursue Adorno’s obsessions with comparable determination. For. Not surprisingly. and.’’ not because Freud underrated rationality.100
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Recourse to Freudian psychoanalysis proves to be of limited help in this endeavor—for Adorno himself drew the line that separates his work from psychological interpretation. above all. exerts irresistible attraction over Adorno’s intellectual imagination. it seems heuristically sound to assume that in matters of love and sex Adorno went his own way. which alone could prove the means. inaccessible. run up against. Marxian. One must isolate those instances in which Adorno’s claims in matters of love extend beyond.10
Mimetic Desire
‘‘Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar’’ (191). Since occasional references to Nietzsche cannot adequately explain the idiosyncratic privilege Minima Moralia accords to sexual experience. all that has been lost.

Any self always owes itself to an other. If individuals could achieve that same afﬁrmative relation with society. Adorno suggests. But only in love is this truth acknowledged. The individual thus no longer claims a self but gains itself as another by mimetically laying claim to the other. Mimetic remainders remind those who speak in the name of the self that no relationship to the self can ever be authentic. love revels in imitation. then—so runs the quasi-platonic logic of Adorno’s argu-
. For the experience of the self in love has ` some bearing on the relationship between society and individual. They also imagine themselves as originary biological units opposed to and separated from the social totality—Adorno argues. by claiming the other in the act of imitation. Vis-avis society. this logic is by no means Hegelian in any straightforward sense. While strictly dialectical. Rather than claiming distance from the other. and it is not available to itself except through the other whom it imitates. that society is in fact prior. already teaches us about the inauthenticity of all attempts at self-relation: ‘‘They always contain an element of imitation. however. while it is limited. it owes [verdankt] it its existence in the most literal sense. In the preceding passage. Heidegger. As the imitation of an other. It grows richer the more freely it develops and reﬂects this relation. mimesis functions as antithetical corrective to claiming authenticity for one’s self and one’s identity.‘‘No Happiness Without Fetishism’’
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comes human at all by imitating other human beings. love supposedly articulates the dialectical truth of the one: an individual or subject is not itself but other than itself. love can serve as a model for what the relationship between self and society should be in Adorno’s eyes. Adorno is ostensibly concerned here with the fate of the concept of authenticity.12 On account of the subject’s dependency on the beloved other. impoverished and reduced by separation and hardening that it lays claim to as an origin’’ (154). Even childhood. the chastised ‘‘priests of authenticity’’ include Kierkegaard. or at any rate from its relation to the object. As a relationship between at least two. and ‘‘not only is the self entwined with society. if they could mimetically emulate the mimesis operative in love. love attains the status of a model. individuals conceive of themselves in ways analogous to those in which the existentialist conceptions of the self are formulated. play. the primal form of love. Schopenhauer. and anyone else smacking of the existentialism Adorno abhorred. wanting to be different’’ (153). and which he treated in the Jargon of Authenticity. the priests of authenticity scent traces of utopia which could shake the structure of domination’’ (154). In such behaviour. All its content comes from society.

Therefore. The unity of the concept of mimesis is jeopardized by the fact that imitating an other is not the same as imitating a relationship to imitation. Adorno’s concept of mimesis proves to be more complicated even where it plays the relatively unambiguous role of a corrective to the discourse of authenticity. it can only be a question of imitating the type of relation to mimesis that Adorno attributes to lovers.14 Lovers are in the unusual position to freely assert. loving couples harbor revolutionary potential. but such freedom is by deﬁnition lacking in the relationship between self and the social. play. To begin with. where the individual is unwillingly and unknowingly mirroring the social whole. signiﬁcant differences separate loving another person from loving society. His argument hinges on one essential premise: imitation somehow redeems the other as well as self. even revel in. Adorno’s allusion to childhood experiments in selfreﬂexivity—‘‘they always contain an element of imitation. and a totality is neither human nor easily imitated. Yet it is precisely up to mimesis to mediate and mitigate such claims. Given that the mimesis presumably at work in love is itself still in need of being mimetically emulated.102
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ment—the political and moral pitfalls of the discourse of authenticity could be avoided and the presumed antagonism between self and society would turn into something like a love affair. wanting to be different’’ (153)—suggests an idealist trajectory in the tradition of
.
The Urgeschichte of Pleasure
The reign of ambivalence over the concept of mimesis manifests itself in other respects. This relation to mimesis alone can become the subject of mimetic practice.13 Following Adorno’s seductive suggestions on this point would yield the conclusion that love relationships are a role model for how individuals should relate to the social whole—and this in turn would entail the rather absurd and justly ridiculed concession that as role models. and it even redeems the banned practice of mimesis. but society is one—because the many that make up society appear here only as the totality of society. There is nothing particularly humane in this second type of mimesis. It would have to be substituted by imitating the type of mimetic behavior presumably familiar to lovers. Its strong humanistic overtones notwithstanding. lovers are (at least) two. mimetic bonding.

’’ in which Adorno denies the psychoanalytic idea of sublimated sexual drives and argues instead for the primacy of another affect: ‘‘Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage. responding to the structurally and historically earlier experience of the encounter with a ‘‘recalcitrant object’’ (109). it is not love or sex but rage. and mimetic behavior already constitutes a step toward liberation. Whatever one might think of Adorno’s quasi-anthropological theorizations. the latent ﬁction of a quasi-Hobbesian state of unrestrained destructive impulses in Minima Moralia serves a very speciﬁc purpose: it allows for the historicization of seemingly primary affects. because it is a freer. Anger and aggression are thus prior. Those passages suggest that the loving mimetic impulse is already a secondary formation. just as contemplation is the concentrated sublimation of the archaic cult of the fetish (see 224). among other places. at other points in Minima Moralia the purportedly humane features of mimesis reveal rather violent underpinnings. Along with mimesis. titled ‘‘Second Harvest. In the ﬁnal instance. it emerges in. civilized and civilizing practice that foregoes destruction in favor of imitation. For those unfamiliar with this scenario from their own childhood. ‘‘aggression’’ (109) reigns supreme. If Adorno knows a primary desire. the positively accentuated concept of mimesis borders on Adorno’s understanding of narcissism— that other highly problematic and fundamentally ambivalent theorem.’’ the relationship to the object is not yet mimetic but is ruled by destructive curiosity. pleasure is ‘‘a late ac-
. which is to say in the beginning. ‘‘sublimated’’ relationship to the object. on which civilization is based’’ (163). in particular the affect of pleasure (Lust).15 As such. the capacity to convert energies once intensiﬁed beyond measure to destroy recalcitrant objects into the concentration of patient observation. as one had earlier when ﬁnding no peace until the quavering voice had been wrenched from the mutilated toy’’ (109). Gottfried Keller has described it emblematically in the opening pages of one of his novellas.‘‘No Happiness Without Fetishism’’
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Schiller’s dictum that man is human only where he plays. so keeping as tight a hold on the secret of things. it is ‘‘violence. Adorno’s quasi-Nietzschean question at the end of that passage leaves no doubt about the origins of mimesis in destruction: ‘‘Might not everything conciliatory been bullied out of that which destroys?’’ (109). where he depicts two children mutilating a doll. section 72. which frequently ﬁgures as both a parallel and a competing model to mimesis. At this juncture. Before mimesis can even enter as a human and humane. However. In this kind of ‘‘primal scene.

just as mimesis is mediated and deﬂected destruction.’’ It intervenes regularly to guard against any unreﬂected identiﬁcation with the powers of pleasure. Fear of the object corresponds to the impulse to destroy the object: ‘‘[i]s not indeed the simplest perception shaped by fear of the thing perceived?’’ (122). Adorno adds. Almost sternly. desire without satisfaction: ‘‘[t]he experience of pleasure presupposes a limitless readiness to throw oneself away. neither (male) aggression nor (female) fear have their equal share in primordial violence. as if spell-bound. withheld. And. ‘‘The yearning into unformed joy. So much for pleasure. Even the mere perception of an object is ruled by impulses that defy the distinction between fear and desire. as objects of violence’’ (90). attests that except in the minutes heureuses. Observing how compulsively. which is as much beyond women in their fear as men in their arrogance. Lust. impervious to the difference. who undergo love in unfreedom.104
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quisition. and foregone violence. the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself’’ (200).17 What disrupts the tendency of all differences to dissolve in the murky Urgeschichte of pleasure as a constitutively ‘‘mixed feeling’’ is nothing other than social deformation. which brings her nothing but pain’’ (90).16 The gendering according to which men rape their ‘‘recalcitrant objects’’ and to which victimized women suffer from ‘‘archaic frigidity. Pleasure. can only be achieved in freedom’’ (91). at least as regards the females. is certainly stereotypical. ‘‘The transience of pleasure. But Minima Moralia’s imperative of failure is sufﬁciently reliable to ensure that abstinence and asceticism are no alternative either. into the pool of salamanders and storks’’ (178) remains just that. Not merely the objective possibility but also the subjective capacity for happiness. ‘‘or by desire for it?’’ (122). the female animal’s fear of copulation. just as the distinction between destruction and desire must remain obscure because they cooriginate in the very same dialectic of losing oneself to gain oneself that is operative in mimesis: ‘‘The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same. Adorno reminds his readers that in this world nobody is actually capable of losing him. when the lover’s forgotten life shines forth from the knees of the beloved. but at the very least. animals couple. and postponed until some impossible utopian state: ‘‘Pleasure in this world is none’’ (175). there
. sometimes apostrophized as ‘‘pathological narcissism.or herself. scarcely older than consciousness. is mediated. it is delayed. the mainstay of asceticism. deﬂected. one recognizes the saying that ‘bliss’ [Wollust] was given to the worm as a piece of idealistic lying.

Adorno writes:
.) Indeed. much less acknowledged. fantasy steps in and makes plenty out of nothing. Since there is insufﬁcient evidence to rule out one interpretive possibility in favor of the other.’’ then in the extreme.19 If ‘‘love is the ability to perceive similarities in the dissimilar. whose intensity rivals that of sexual experience in the widest sense. but in stark contrast to the tradition of ennobling carnal love by imbuing it with transcendental signiﬁcance. as yet. What saves pleasure is ultimately not that it is not (yet) ‘‘pleasure. It suggests that pleasure’s ﬂeetingness holds out the promise of a type of pleasure that would never end.’’ but that Lust does not last.18 The other. the question needs to be left open at this point. one could also argue that pleasure’s transience alone sustains the life of pleasure. If that were so. a pseudotheological logic seems at work. (A case in point is the ability of the lover to recognize his forgotten life in the reﬂection of a pair of knees. trait of his intellectual universe is an obsession with death and mortality.
Love and Death
Why (and how) could pleasure’s transience underwrite its antiascetic afﬁrmation? Initially. the transient experience of love would function as the placeholder for inﬁnity or. From the ‘‘mainstay of asceticism’’ Adorno wrests a notion that allows him to reinstate the very prerogative of pleasure he had just negated. One of those dimensions—the power of fantasy—is well known beyond the limits of the present topic and recognized as a signiﬁcant theorem in Adorno in general. love would be the ability to perceive similarities where there are none whatsoever. But this indicates a good juncture at which to introduce two additional systemic features of Adorno’s thoughts on love and desire that might help to further contextualize the issue. transience would allegorically preﬁgure ‘‘reconciliation’’ or utopia. as Adorno would have it. no pleasure at all’’ (176). the very absence of any deﬁning traits and marks of individuality can incite love. Where there is nothing to imitate. according to Adorno. In a passage strongly indebted to the Romantic phantasma of heartless female beauty. Pleasure’s transience would then not stand in for something else but would signify an emphasis on ﬁnitude pure and simple.‘‘No Happiness Without Fetishism’’
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is. By the same token. The sentence signiﬁcantly modiﬁes the categorical impossibility of pleasure.

And one should pause before subsuming the sex appeal of the dead under the Platonic-Christian dogma that love begets life. of this well-meaning enlightenment and critique. His proof comes by way of a novella by Theodor Storm in which the young Friesian boy’s infatuation with the poor Bavarian girl from the traveling players is ignited not only by her relative exoticism.106
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‘‘Imagination is inﬂamed by women who lack. because the living are the theatre of its desperate desire to save. Adorno comments: ‘‘Imagination gives offence to poverty. . But under the cover. The closing paragraph returns full circle to the beginning: ‘‘Love falls for the soulless as a cipher of living spirit. precisely.20 However. which can exercise itself only on the lost: soul dawns on love only in its absence. who entertains a similar relationship to the dead objects of his learned fascination. by her poverty. and above all. . soul itself is the longing of the soulless for redemption’’ (170). While Minima Moralia contains many peculiar and. But in the same breath he asserts. In both. love attends to and tends toward not just the creaturely but. remote from the reﬂection of the self. eventually. as it were.’’ the logic organizing the cultural fascination with exotic phenomena such as the North’s stereotypes about the South or the bourgeoisie’s investment in nomadic cultures. the soulless and lifeless advance to a cipher of something other than itself. Adorno doggedly pursues his initial point about the erotic fascination with beauty that lacks a soul. for a female reader. this remark deviates so little from the well-known stereotypes of female beauty that one might be inclined to write it off as just that: the unreﬂected reproduction of a stereotype. For it is dubious whether awakening the dead
. No doubt. While this is somewhat enigmatic. indeed of a self at all: Oscar Wilde coined the name unenigmatic Sphinxes for them’’ (169). for Adorno. the creaturely ones. but also. frequently irritating and occasionally enraging propositions about women. For shabbiness has charm only for the onlooker’’ (170). Their attraction stems from their lack of awareness of themselves. also the nonliving. to which it does violence: the happiness it pursues is inscribed in the features of suffering’’ (170). Adorno immediately launches into a self-corrective maneuver by adding that such perception of women ‘‘does no justice to their needy empirical existence’’ (169). Love’s attraction to the soulless reveals the lover as akin to Walter Benjamin’s allegorist. So the expression called human is precisely that of the eyes close to those of the animal. the remaining lines suggest that Adorno seeks to critically ¨ ´ expose what he terms the ‘‘cycle of bourgeois longing for naıvete. . At the last. conversely: ‘‘And yet imagination needs poverty. imagination.

at every moment. Like Benjamin (in his 1921 essay ‘‘Critique of Violence’’). Snow White’s death also restores and recovers ‘‘her unlived. For Adorno. Life. But Adorno’s erotic interest in death is not exhausted by its dialectical constellation with the cult of life. banished life. The poisoned apple lodged in her throat is not a ‘‘means of murder’’ but. Beauty ‘‘arrests life and therefore its decay’’ (77). which is akin to it) amounts to nothing less than a recovery from the sickness that is life.’’ This ‘‘unlived life’’ is not eternal life but the life not lived because living one life excludes other possibilities and other. Adorno’s reading of one of the most famous fairy tales tells a somewhat different story. potential lives. Adorno calls upon beauty to halt the course of life. The impression that beauty thus renders the transitoriness permanent is misleading: life needs to be arrested not because of its transience but because of its destructive furor. since she is lured by no more false messengers’’ (121). any life. The same technique of symmetrical inversion makes it possible to expose ‘‘healthy’’ individuals as walking corpses: ‘‘[u]nderlying the prevalent health is death’’ (59). a sort of justice has been done to the possible lives that were not lived at the expense of the lived life. Adorno voiced strong suspicions about the dogma of the sanctity of life. The Kurnberger motto of Minima Moralia’s ‘‘Life ¨ does not live’’ (19) points in the same direction. Life is violence: ‘‘[t]o hate destructiveness one must hate life as well’’ (78). he lingers on the image of Snow White in the glass cofﬁn. Adorno’s inversion of Kierkegaard becomes explicit in the title of another entry: ‘‘The Health unto Death’’ (58). At issue here is not the religious doctrine that mortality guarantees eternal life. all of which are sacriﬁced to the one lived life. The subsequent sentence elevates death to the utopian image of a nondestructive life: ‘‘[O]nly death is an image of undistorted life’’ (78). Lovingly. In a passage criticizing in no uncertain terms the vitalist tradition of philosophy.21 In death. when no life whatsoever is possible any longer. nor is it a matter of rendering ﬂeeting life permanent. death (and beauty. from which only now she truly recovers. ‘‘For deeper knowledge cannot believe that she was awakened who lies as if asleep in the glass cofﬁn’’ (121). is destructive above all because it produces. Moreover. banished life. countless other possibilities of life. His disdain for the cult of life is as deep-seated as his fascination with death. rather. For now this lived life has also become what the other lives were from the begin-
. ‘‘the rest of her unlived. Only death grants recovery from the sickness of life.‘‘No Happiness Without Fetishism’’
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to life is the point of Adorno’s remark.

it also answers the question of why the lover can recognize his ‘‘forgotten life in the knees’’ of the beloved. momentarily disappears. The actual love between the reawakened Snow White and the Prince fails to redeem that original loss: ‘‘The happy end takes away nothing from this’’ (121). but a form of ﬁdelity to the transitoriness of life.
1-800-Flowers
Flowers must be among the oldest symbols of love. In the particular case of ‘‘Snow White. The gendered symbolic value of breaking ﬂowers. the transience of pleasure is. the stab of bleeding. This is Adorno’s version of the afﬁnity between pleasure and death. The experience and the observation of pleasure afford the unique spectacle of death in life. the black mourning of the window-frame. The past as it was lived and the past possibilities that were not lived now share the same plane. then. inspired by the eroticism of that which no longer lives. the mutual exclusion between the facticity of lived life and the unlived possibilities it produces.’’ the unlived life is not an abstract possibility but a very speciﬁc life that remained quite literally unlived: that of the Queen. only to abandon them. Adorno’s own theorizations of love are. after the lifelessly living beauty of the ﬂakes. in the ﬁnal instance. Incidentally. still resonates in the term deﬂoration. familiar from medieval poetry down to Goethe.108
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ning: nothing but a past possibility. According to Adorno. If one believes Adorno. the ‘‘minutes heureuses’’ of self-abandonment momentarily restore unlived possibilities. As a memento mori. who fell in love with the beauty behind glass and only accidentally dislodged the apple when lifting the cofﬁn lid. But plucking ﬂowers for the purpose of adorning the beloved was origi-
. not the placeholder for a life that would have escaped mortality. and then dying in childbirth’’ (121). a certain usage of the ﬂower metaphor betrays the truth of female castration: ‘‘The woman who feels herself a wound when she bleeds knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a ﬂower because that suits her husband’’ (95). Adorno has a very speciﬁc reason to privilege this phenomenon: in this experience the sequential order of time has been dissolved. Like the Prince in the fairy tale. who had been ‘‘wishing for her daughter.

it not only deﬂects but also recalls and reenacts the original violence. The logic of this passage is complicated and ambivalent. sacriﬁce. probably by Jean Paul. While this might all seem dangerously close to a theology of love—although one may wonder whether there is any sustained reﬂection on love that would not be theological in some way—Adorno makes abundantly clear that plucking ﬂowers will no longer do. Immortal memories turn into memories of mortality. this is achieved by acknowledging the injustice done to all those other possible relations by the adoration of this person and none other. In the passage on ﬂowers. as in any sacriﬁce. In a distinctly theological vein. the unlived. The section titled ‘‘All the Little Flowers’’ makes explicit this very nontheological emphasis on transience for transience’s sake. as Adorno’s reﬂections on the betrayed or refused lover show. belongs in the storehouse of impotently sentimental consolation that the subject. that memories are the only possessions which no-one can take from us. However. Who exactly is being sacriﬁced? The ﬂower or the beloved? Given the intricate symbolic potential of ﬂowers. demand a justice that no court. possible lives. can extend.‘‘No Happiness Without Fetishism’’
109
nally a different matter altogether: decoration. ‘‘Now that we can no longer pluck ﬂowers to adorn our beloved—a sacriﬁce that adoration for the one atones by freely taking on itself the wrong it does all others—picking ﬂowers has become something evil’’ (112). human or otherwise. It is an ‘‘inalienable and unindictable human right to be loved by the beloved’’ (164) but no court can enforce this right because what the lover ‘‘desires can only be given freely’’ (164). resignedly withdrawing into inwardness. This is why even this harmless sacriﬁce is in need of reconciliation or atonement. ‘‘It serves only to perpetuate the transient by ﬁxing it’’ (112). According to Adorno. Once again. the unlived. possible relationships.
. ‘‘The pronouncement. Adorno concludes that ‘‘the secret of justice in love is the annulment of all rights to which love mutely points’’ (165). would like to be the very fulﬁlment he has given up’’ (166). Plucking ﬂowers (rather than lovers) is a deﬂected substitute. probably both. Adorno leaves one option open: ‘‘But someone in rapture who sends ﬂowers will reach instinctively for the ones that look mortal’’ (112). Despite the stern rejections. primary violence has been displaced from a person to the adorning ﬂower. reconciliation consists quasi-Christologically in assuming guilt incurred by loving someone particular. and reconciliation all at once.

in der Erfahrung der unabdingbaren Grenze zwischen zwei Menschen auf eben jenes Moment zu reﬂek¨ tieren und damit im gleichen Augenblick. F.’’ Its subject is the inevitable decline of erotic relationships. And this very knowledge dawns on the lovers already in the very moment of rapture. or. not because this world knows no true passion. It is as if he had sobered up. and dutifully subjugated his occasional excesses under the law of reﬂection. Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from a Damaged Life. Adorno seems to take it all back. The power of ¨ passion. but because Adorno enters love unambiguously under the rubric of the ‘‘guilty cycle of ¨ all creaturely [schuldhaften Kreis des Naturlichen]. Jephcott (London: Verso. E. N. All quotations in the present chapter are from this work. passion is doomed to fail. 1985). The ﬁreworks of pleasure and passion might be over. it reverses his other speculations on love in Minima Moralia. it turns out. page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text. Another factor at play is ‘‘fear of the transience of one’s own feeling. die Nichtigkeit der Uberwaltigung einzusehen’’ (293). he holds on to the failure of love with the same exclusionary. To be sure. 3.’’ but Adorno adds: ‘‘Und doch ist der Passion selber es unausweichlich. better.
Notes
1. Adorno had good reason to exclude this ‘‘post festum’’. it is a power that is nichtig. is no power at all.
. the insight that every passion is relative in the big picture of reﬂection and hindsight is still considered ‘‘blasphemous. Occasionally. the translation has been slightly modiﬁed. Their implicit theoretical signiﬁcance has been severely restricted. Feared loss of love is not the only reason for the accompanying melancholy.’’ This is the end of Adorno’s love affair with love. However.’’22 It is not hard to guess that the entire section amounts to the clearest possible rejection of passion’s redemptive value—not because it does not last. da man von ihr uberwaltigt ¨ ¨ wird. Theodor Adorno.’’ the appendix contains a section aptly titled ‘‘Post Festum. trans.110
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‘‘Post Festum’’
Adorno banned his ﬁnal word on the matter of love and lust from the book proper. Like everything else. Whereas the ofﬁcial version of Minima Moralia concludes with the entry ‘‘Towards the End. Post festum. but to use it. as Jean Paul knew. the point of ﬁreworks never was to illuminate the night.’’ which has no way out. blind passion as that of a lover clinging to the beloved. But then. The only available option is ‘‘reﬂection on the closure [Geschlossenheit] of this cycle. relinquished all quasi-theological passions.

esp. In other words. For an important discussion of homosexuality in Minima Moralia. Philosophie der Ubertreibung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ¨ 2004). Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reﬂections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press. even these works seem spare and ascetic. see E. 9. The redemptive potential of mimesis is best illustrated by an anecdote. This reading was substantially reﬁned in the chapter on the master/slave dialectic and its aftermath in her more recent book The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press.’’ in Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne: Vernunftkritik nach Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhr¨ kamp. 10. 2003). 14. See Anson Rabinbach’s lucid analysis in ‘‘Why Were the Jews Sacriﬁced? The Place of AntiSemitism in the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment. in the United States. 13. Theodor W. Rolf Tiedemann et al. Hegel.’’ New German Critique 56 (Spring–Summer 1992): 143–70. 1997). fulﬁllment remains subordinate to longing. understandable as a compensatory posture assumed in deﬁance of Hegel’s presumed negligence of the individual at the expense of the universal. In his eyes. ed. 3.‘‘No Happiness Without Fetishism’’
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2. Adorno found himself shaking the hand of a guest who had no hand but a prosthesis instead.’’ Adorno’s insistence on the powers of love is. all love stories are misguided from the start in their sad attempt to stake the claim of universality on the contingency of ‘‘this woman’’ or ‘‘that man. 12. The matter might look slightly different from a U. eds. 99.S. It is tempting to argue that Adorno’s thoughts are prototypical for what has been called
. Schein. 8. had little sympathy for love’s universal aspirations. trans. 11.. 31–62. translation my own.. 9–47. 1998). On the topic of embarrassment and shame in Minima Moralia.’ ’’ New German Critique 81 (Fall 200): 49–64. Minima Moralia neu gelesen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. In that sense Adorno desires desire. Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Jaimey Fisher (New York: Berghahn Books. 1997). They are obviously besides the point here. Andreas Bernhard and Ulrich Raulff. ed. Charlie Chaplin had observed the incident from nearby and immediately proceeded to imitate Adorno’s gesture of horriﬁed recoiling.’’ in Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects. The pieces written for television and radio are an exception in this regard. she was able to locate in Hegel a mechanism of desire. The ﬂeeting experience actually seems primarily destined to renew longing. perspective. ‘‘Mega Melancholia: Adorno’s Minima Moralia. rather. The story is told in the volume Vierzig Jahre Flaschenpost. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 2001). ‘‘A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment? Horkheimer and Adorno Revisited. The biographical accuracy of this statement was amply underscored by the revelations that marked the recent centennial. to some extent. On the role of exaggeration in philosophy and in Adorno in ¨ ´ particular. ‘‘Wahrheit. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno. for one. in that Adorno’s reception skipped the formative political phase. 49–68. See Theodor W. 6. One of the few works offering a sustained engagement with problems on love is Tom Pepper’s ‘‘Guilt by (Un)Free Association’’: Adorno on Romance et al. 1985). The comical imitation. the very features disdained in Germany found a warm welcome in the 1990s. Among those likely to take issue with this admittedly rather crude differentiation between Hegel and Adorno on love is Judith Butler. 5. 1987). In accordance with the logic of failure. see Alexander Garcıa Duttmann. Yet. Versohnung: Adornos asthetische Rettung der Mod¨ ¨ ernitat. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Asthetische Theorie. in Gesammelte Werke. engaged and exaggerated in turn. Adorno. 263. Adorno’s exaggerations on this point are not to be neutralized but.’’ in Modern Language Notes 109 (1994): 913–37. ¨ 7. When taking leave from a party in Hollywood. from the shock of their encounter. Albrecht Wellmer. released him (and presumably the guest with the prosthesis as well). 4.. Already in her ﬁrst book. G. Adorno comments. see Andrew Hewitt. compared with Minima Moralia’s rich materials.

But since this particular concept has become so ubiquitous as to have lost much of its meaning. who in Die Souveranitat ¨ der Kunst: Asthetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 15. among them aesthetic production and experience. Kunst als Kritik: Adornos Weg aus der Dialektik (Wurzburg: Konigshausen und Neumann. sober asceticism recommends itself. This is why the typological distinction between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ narcissism does not hold. and Feminism (London: Sage. The Culture Industry Revised: Theodor W. The expression is characteristically ambivalent. Rolf Tiedemann et al. 1999). All references are to page 293 of that edition. The logic organizing such transitions is the dialectic of sacriﬁce. 21. On representations of the feminine. 20. 17. In Minima Moralia Adorno calls every artwork a ‘‘coerced malfeasance’’ [eine abgedungene Untat] (111). See Deborah Cook. For a pertinent discussion of fantasy in Adorno. All quotations in this section are from the ¨ German edition. for Untat is the deed not done. ¨ ¨ ¨ ¨ 19.112
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‘‘performativity’’ in the wake of Judith Butler’s reﬂections. ed. That this is not an existentialist conviction is evident from Adorno’s detailed discussion of the relationship between linear time and property relations in the entry titled ‘‘Morality and Temporal Sequence’’ (78ff. Adorno on Mass Culture (London: Rowman and Littleﬁeld). 1996. In Minima Moralia. love is also called the ‘‘after-image’’ or ‘‘re-enactment’’ (Nachbild) of the sacriﬁcial ritual (217). Culture. 2000). together with mimesis and narcissism the concluding pillar of the theoretical ediﬁce on which the narrative of the Dialectic of Enlightenment rests. translations my own. 22. but the preﬁx also connotes a particularly gruesome deed. see Maggie O’Neill. The shadow of pleasure’s violent Urgeschichte looms large enough to extend to other forms of pleasure as well. Adorno. One writer who has acknowledged this trait is Christoph Menke. 2003). ed. 16. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.). 1988) remarks on Adorno’s death-bound existentialism (214).
. see Britta Scholze. 18. The appendix is not translated into English. Minima Moralia: Reﬂexionen aus dem beschadigten Leben in Gesammelte Schriften.

Traditional and Critical Theory
One of the myths circulating about Theodor Adorno is that he died of a heart attack from the shock of the ‘‘bared-breasts incident. as ‘‘der Busenaktion. —Karl Marx. —Max Horkheimer.’’ In the spring of 1969 at the University of Frankfurt. shortly after Adorno began his lecture in his class
. One afternoon. leftist students were ardently ﬁghting for long-overdue reforms at the university and attempting to ignite a dialogue about the Nazi past of a German society that had been lulled into complacency in the postwar years.’’ otherwise referred to. the effort to keep oneself from being deceived any longer. Students were particularly disenchanted with the Frankfurt School thinkers and criticized them for failing to produce a viable response to Fascism and to the emerging monopoly capitalism.6
The Bared-Breasts Incident
Lisa Yun Lee
The philosophers have only interpreted the world. in various ways. Theses on Feuerbach Thought itself is already a sign of resistance. the point is to change it. in the German.

as another student rushed to the blackboard and wrote. ‘‘Whomever allows the beloved Adorno to do what he pleases will remain under the spell of capitalism forever.4 These students represented a part of the emerging criticism of the Frankfurt School that claimed that thinkers such as Adorno. it touches on and illustrates the complexities of the issues I will discuss in this chapter: theory. Horkheimer.’’2 A commotion broke out in the seminar room and three leather jacket–clad feminists from the SDS (German Socialist Students) barged up to the podium. interrupting him. lavishing him with rose and tulip petals and erotic caresses. but also as a male thinker and an icon of
. surrounded Adorno. ‘‘I postulated a theoretical model for thought. You decide if my lecture will take place or not. a student at the very back of the seminar room spoke out. Dissident intellectuals replaced the proletariat. Adorno naively asks. and their relation to the body in Adorno’s philosophy. praxis. How could I suspect that people want to realize it with Molotov cocktails?’’5 His statement further stressed the growing schism between critical theory and revolutionary action. and masculine/feminine.’’ in an interview with ¨ Die Suddeutsche Zeitung a few days after the incident. theory/praxis. Adorno continued to infuriate many activists in the German New Left when he criticized the ‘‘illusory character of the student’s form of praxis. They also distributed ﬂiers that contained the statement ‘‘Adorno as an institution is dead. They were disgruntled with the lack of support for their spontaneous demonstrations and tired of the subordination of their political and revolutionary goals to the intellectual demands of theory set out by the ‘‘fathers of the movement’’—of whom Adorno was the patriarch.’’1 Adorno.’’3 The women were frustrated with what they considered Adorno’s mandarin approach to the current political situation. not just as a thinker. issued an ultimatum: ‘‘I’ll give you ﬁve minutes. and bared their breasts to him. The fact that these students believed that baring their breasts would be the most appropriate course of action to demonstrate their discontent is revealing.114
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Introduction to Dialectical Thinking. The students’ actions were undertaken to humiliate Adorno. and others abandoned the working class and its economic struggles as the primary agents of social history and substituted in their place the power of critical thought. Although the effects of this bizarre incident have been greatly overstated. clearly angered by the disruption. reason/passion. because it exposes a series of classical dualistic oppositions at work in their critique: mind/body. and theory replaced praxis.

. Baring their breasts was a direct challenge to his masculinity and aimed at exposing the impotence of theory. My discussion will focus primarily on Adorno’s most self-reﬂexive work. as both a lack of voice. and as a form of disembodiment. Adorno notes in the foreword to the book that he is writing ‘‘from the standpoint of subjective experience. materiality. . and ﬂustered—to sheepishly leave the lecture hall. their bodies became the transcendental signiﬁer of everything on the right side of the restrictive binaries listed above. and sensuality of the bodies forced him—speechless. he is always astray. ‘‘Every intellectual in emigration.’’6 This mutilation is experienced in the body.’’ writes Adorno in one poignant moment. The immediacy. . and does well to acknowledge it of himself. He lives in an environment that must remain incomprehensible to him . Adorno’s inability to directly confront the corporeal speciﬁcity of this situation is also revealing. In my discussion. I will also look at Adorno’s short essay ‘‘Marginalia on Theory and Praxis. without exception. In this act. . I will use this historical event as a point of departure for an examination of the profound importance of corporeality in Adorno’s philosophy.’’ which he wrote under great duress. I will show how he recasts this tenacious dualism as a constellation of contradictions that illuminates the body in a new and insightful way for feminists. ashamed. after he had returned to Germany and was compelled to respond to the student revolts at the end of the 1960s. caused by the physical displacement. . resulting from the expropriation of language. damaged. The body that Adorno champions in his theoretical prose is not the equivalent of the unruly bodies of those female students. the quixotic book of aphorisms Minima Moralia. Both texts were written during tumultuous periods in which the effectiveness and usefulness of theory was being questioned in the
. and the oppressive relationship between subject and object—all of which have played a role in the subjugation of women. ‘‘is.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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the institution that critical theory had come to represent.’’ and it is painfully obvious how his damaged experience of living in the United States shapes the somatic quality of his writing. Adorno refashions the pain of his experience by employing metaphors of corporeality in order to viscerally critique the discipline of philosophy that bifurcates mind and body. the troubled relationship between theory and praxis. At the same time. Adorno’s nuanced discussion exposes the rupture of mind and body as a nested set of problems that includes the division of mental and physical labor.

it is located in a text appended to the Dialectic of Enlightenment titled ‘‘The Importance of the Body. ‘‘Dialectic thought.116
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face of social upheaval and unrest.’’ As I will discuss below.’’ Adorno insists. using the strength of its own arguments against its own conclusions. using the internal contradictions of a work to criticize the work itself. Minima Moralia. there is only one short.’’8 The scattered references to the body should be read as an attempt to formally evade the homogenizing impetus of identity logic.’’9 Adorno’s experience of the United States was characterized by his difference—his
. ‘‘An emancipated society. This manner of criticism confronts a particular mode of thinking with its own logic. ‘‘would conceive the better state as one in which people could be different without fear. Adorno’s style can be understood as a kind of strategic asceticism and critique of forms of thought that would deny pleasure and desire in an effort to repress the body. and social change is Adorno’s most personal work. Instead of trying to resolve these moments of tension. I am particularly interested in the contradictions between Adorno’s evocation of the body in theory and his description of the practice of the body as an agent of political change. I will argue that it is precisely within this dialectic of the body that Adorno’s philosophy is most illuminating. systematic analysis of the body in Adorno’s thought is entirely consistent with his commitment to the formative nature of style. the absence of a sustained. although I will be arguing for its signiﬁcance in Adorno’s thought. dialectical thought. and immanent critique. lived experience.’’ Immanent critique remains within what it criticizes. sustained piece of writing directly concerning the body. Adorno adopts this mode of critique from Hegel. In fact. Its subtitle—Reﬂections from a Damaged Life—expresses the degree to which Adorno felt wounded and maimed by his American experience. It is compelling that the text that contains the most startling revelations about the tension between theory and praxis and the relationship between philosophy.7 In this chapter. ‘‘is an attempt to break out of the coercion of logic through its own means. who claimed that genuine refutation is not achieved ‘‘by defeating the opponent where he is not. the body persistently appears in heterogeneous fragments throughout Adorno’s oeuvre as the speciﬁcally corporeal ¨ (Leib). the more general body (Korper). It is important to immediately emphasize that there is no single uniﬁed theory of the body in Adorno’s writings.’’ Adorno writes in one of his few prophetic statements.’’ However. and what he refers to as ‘‘metaphors of the body. one of the key leitmotifs of his thought.

Living in the margins can be fostered as a site of radical possibility. in fact. When this motley group of intellectuals introduced their work to the general public in the United States. and dissolve into the melting pot was tantamount to a demand that he acquiesce to a form of self-annihilation. at the center. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create. Rather than seeing it simply as a place of exclusion and a status that one wishes to lose. Adorno was the very model of the absentminded (German) professor for his entire tenure in the United States. we can cultivate it as ‘‘a site one stays in. or an oppositional aesthetic act. This was a matter of living his philosophy. Adorno accentuated his differences. As Jamie Owen Daniel has provocatively argued.’’10 Adorno insisted on his otherness so that he would not easily become consumed by the American culture industry. because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist.’’ One can imagine that Adorno. leaving his wife. and there was no established social niche to accommodate the artists and thinkers who had migrated during the Fascist period. clings to even. He refused to write in English. to imagine alternatives.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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identity as a German-Jewish intellectual—which thrice marked him as an outsider.’’12 Adorno’s philosophy is entirely consistent with this acknowledgment of the fact
. if you will. . also managed to derive a strange pleasure from the assertion of his otherness and his outsider status. new worlds. become the opposite. lives. the American people did not know how to respond. anti-Semitism was still very much a part of the American landscape.’’11 hooks describes this as a form of ‘‘choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. hooks argues that one should ‘‘maintain that marginality even as one works. ‘‘Theodor Adorno actively held on to and even accentuated all the markers of his cultural difference precisely because he recognized that the pressure being brought against him to stop behaving ‘so foreign’ . to translate most of his work. Instead of repressing the characteristics that marked his ‘‘otherness. Gretel Karplus Adorno. She beautifully argues that it can. Marginality can be understood here as a sort of deﬁant political gesture.’’ and rather than attempting to blend into the American landscape. I am reminded here of bell hooks’s description of marginality and outsider status as something that can be more than a site of deprivation and pain. and the war with Germany created an understandable if not excusable suspicion toward all Germans—natives or descendents—in the United States. In addition. produces. . The United States did not produce or regard intellectuals in the same way that Europe did. who clearly suffered because of his exile.

Laurence Rickels profoundly names California the ‘‘unconscious of Europe. Adorno reﬂects with melancholy on the paradox of his earlier experience and that from which he writes: ‘‘The major part of this book was written during the war.’’14 This contradiction—the fact that he
. I would argue that Adorno was aware of this juxtaposition of the proliferation of the culture industry in the United States and the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The violence that expelled me thereby denied me full knowledge of it. and the project of critical theory is precisely that effort to maintain marginality. that one never reaches utopia. This understanding informs both the particular and the universal aspects of Adorno’s material historical analyses.’’ The trivial pursuits that Adorno writes about here ﬂy in the face of the philosophical tradition that attempts to create ‘‘theories of everything’’ and considers only ‘‘enduring’’ issues and ‘‘timeless’’ concerns while masking its own historicity. There is a persistent examination of philosophy’s ‘‘original sin’’—the division of mental and physical labor. The work consists of 153 aphorisms that reﬂect Adorno’s plea for ‘‘micrological’’ thinking and a ‘‘philosophy of the fragment. This is an underpinning of Adorno’s works.’’13 Rickels astutely draws connections between the experience of California and the critique of Fascism by the Frankfurt School thinkers and argues that exile from Nazi Germany forced them to read the rise of National Socialism through the lens of California coastal culture. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s formulation of the fragment. Living in Los Angeles—with its artiﬁce. Adorno wrote about both as a set of twin phenomena that are both products of the processes of reiﬁcation. the aphorisms formally assault the supposedly seamless totality of capitalism by revealing the discontinuous nature of experience. In the dedication of Minima Moralia. In his fascinating work The Case of California. a constant movement toward a better human condition. The structure of the book shapes Adorno’s discussion. Although Rickels tends to view this as a form of unintentional slippage and a shortcoming in the Frankfurt School’s critique of Fascism. Minima Moralia deals self-reﬂexively with Adorno’s role as an intellectual in general and with his work as a philosopher in particular. and that change is precisely that. under conditions enforcing contemplation. Adorno perceived the Californian obsession with the perfect body as an ersatz version of the Nazi preoccupation with the perfect form. the heart of the culture industry—with the bodybuilders of Venice Beach only a few miles from his bungalow in Holly Hills.118
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that the work is never done.

In order to fully comprehend the complex issues that help shape Adorno’s critical attention to the body. in his seminal work. but rather was propagated to encourage a puerile longing for the genuine and the natural. Nationalism and Sexuality. breathing. such as expressionist art or the works of Thomas Mann. led by Richard
. therefore. as celebrated in proto-Fascist and right-wing groups such as the German Youth Movement and the Nacktkultur. The appeal of and to the body did not encourage sensuousness. or a revolt from traditional morals. from Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s notion of beauty to Stefan George’s poetic plea to return to the purity of nature in his cult of genius. the Nazis rejected the sensuousness that had prevailed in the preceding gen` eration of ﬁn de siecle decadents. Nazi culture was enchanted by the human form. Artistic and literary renderings of the body that inspired heightened sensibility and stimulation. fulﬁlling their cool. Minima Moralia must be read. were labeled decadent and unworthy of the pure political body that the Nazis were attempting to fashion. This effort will allow me to historically situate Adorno’s understanding of the body and to give a sense of the complex dynamics to which he is responding.15 Favoring a more austere and puritan model of the body. material reality. Numerous marble statues for public spaces were commissioned by the Nazis. as a text that is about both Fascism and Adorno’s reﬂections on his experience of practicing philosophy in exile because of Fascism. memorials. and ﬁlms expressed a physical beauty stripped of sexuality and uncontrolled passion. it is useful to make a brief detour here and sketch out some of the fundamental aspects of the perverse fascination with the body in Nazi ideology.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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is denied a full knowledge of Fascism because of the exile imposed on him by Fascism—motivates and propels this work. The art promoted an aestheticized. repressive sexual society based on the containment of vital forces. The body was. controlled.’’16 The body. however. more a ‘‘phantasmagoric’’ ideal than a living. George Mosse. The Lebensreform movements that promoted gymnastics and bodily awareness were exercises in disciplining the individual’s body and also a rehearsal for the creation of a submissive polity. restrained ideal of perfection. shows how the ‘‘rediscovery of the body’’ during the Nazi period drew on existing German literary and cultural trends. The movements of the gymnasts in rigid patterns performed as mass athletic demonstrations evoke what Susan Sontag describes in ‘‘Fascinating Fascism’’ as ‘‘the holding in or conﬁning of force: military precision. The invocations of ancient Greece in paintings.

Male Fantasies. Nudism in print media was banned during the Nazi period with the exception of bodies depicted as engaged in motion or sport. my discussion of Minima Moralia will show that the body is not absent from Adorno’s work. has accused the Frankfurt School intellectuals. Theweleit uncovers an exterminating rage against female sexual power and a fear of the female body behind the masculine constructions of bands of German paramilitary groups during World War II. is guilty of ignoring feelings and emotions and repressing desire in favor of the ‘‘intellectual.’’17 He goes on to argue: ‘‘All of the lines of scientiﬁc research based purely on ideological criticism. ignore the same basic area: the things that happen in. but. published in 1940. human bodies. Klaus Theweleit. is absolutely central to Adorno’s investigations. is incapable of grasping the somatic origins of Fascism. These imperatives about the body were manifest in virtually all cultural artifacts from this period. Theweleit attacks the Frankfurt School for their ‘‘historical-materialist’’ approach. and to. he argues. Popular books such as Der Sieg der Korper¨ freude. literature. At the beginning of his book. . and the widely distributed series Die Schonheit focused on the body but operated under strict censure. Discussions of sexuality in the media were also banned. The point of this digression is to suggest that the Nazi fascination with and fear of the body provided the historical context for Adorno’s own investigation and critical attention to the body. which he claims is a means by which ‘‘rational men have at once attempted to account for fascism and protect themselves from what it means. the thinker most associated with an interpretation of Fascism revolving around the centrality of the body. Theweleit draws connections between history and fantasy. and particularly Adorno. whether they were from the visual arts. or public events and spectacles. ﬁlms. contrary to Theweleit’s assertions. and all of the theoretical approaches that practice historical-materialist-philosophical-metapsychological manipulations . which consisted of warnings to the reader about the dire consequences of masturbation and sex for pleasure rather than procreation.’’18 The Frankfurt School. was puriﬁed of contamination through diet and exercise in the name of the regeneration of the race. The dif-
. or Ideologiekritik (headed by the Frankfurt School). Theweleit further suggests. In his fascinating and inﬂuential psychoanalytic study. except in ‘‘public service’’ announcements.’’ who.120
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Ungewitter. Bodies were ranked according ¨ to character and physique. . Although it is impossible to thoroughly debate Theweleit’s overreaching contentions here. for ignoring the body.

from unskilled. as a sort of Taylorism of the mind. thus giving authenticity and immutability to his ideas about how to run a place of work. the worker’s body becomes increasingly regarded as purely functional and composed of elements that can be divided into discrete parts and employed mechanistically to perform alienating tasks.’’ In the effort to promote ‘‘pure reason. philosophy is the enterprise that is most guilty of perpetuating the division of mental and physical labor and performing what Adorno graphically describes as a ‘‘vivisection of the body. A simple example of this is the standard philosophical notion of ‘‘separating emotions from reason. in his inﬂuential book. W. but also corporeal and grounded in sensual experience. In contrast. rather than of a lack of attention. who performed mental labor. In his book. manual workers. Taylor introduced a new system of production. suggested these improvements in the name of ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ management. In the name of promoting ‘‘productivity of thought. The Principles of Scientiﬁc Management. In the name of promoting worker productivity. and to prevent and wastage of intellectual energy.’’ philosophy attempts to disunite the physical.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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ﬁculty in locating the body in Adorno’s work is a result of his theoretical insistence on mediation. the inner coherence of his style.’’ Adorno accuses philosophy of following the principles of Taylorism. He criticizes philosophy for conspiring with the dominant mode of production to bifurcate the human subject into mind and body. He exposes what he considers to be the ‘‘forces of production’’ behind the work of philosophy. to help improve its production methods. and the logical structure of his critique. It is expected. In Taylorism. Adorno attempts to realize philosophy in his own efforts as a form of work that is not just cerebral. In Adorno’s writings. to rationalize the storage of knowledge. replacing the old rule-of-thumb approach. Taylor devised a system of ordering labor that transformed work structures and labor relations. In addition. In other words. F.’’ emotions are discounted and marginalized. Taylor suggested the separation of skilled workers. sensual aspects of human existence from sentient being. ‘‘The ofﬁcial philosophy ministers to science in the following way. In one of the longer fragments in Minima Moralia. titled ‘‘Intellectus Sacriﬁcium Intellectus.’’ He cleverly integrates the body into his critique of philosophy.’’ Adorno examines the ways in which the intel-
.’’19 In 1911. Taylorism ‘‘reiﬁed’’ the division of labor and made this way of managing the workplace appear inevitable and ‘‘natural. This fracturing of the workplace ensured that a division of labor would be built into the very structure of the workplace. Taylor.

he calls this ‘‘the castration of perception by a court of control that denies thought any anticipatory desire’’ (123). the less capable it is of actually thinking. astoundingly. when purged of emotions. is itself an expression of the process of stupefaction.’’ Adorno. Sentient beings are no longer able to think and act imaginatively or creatively. In this quote. A breach occurs between body
. forms of perception—seeing. He viscerally describes this division of human beings into mind and body as a form of dismemberment. He writes. titled ‘‘Wishful Thinking. hearing. suggests that there is a moral imperative to make emotions and feelings an integral part of the thinking process. impulses. ‘‘Intelligence is a moral category. instincts.20 This false understanding of intellect is one that is sanitized. In philosophy’s pursuit of epistemic objectivity. The separation of feeling and understanding. having developed through interaction. Adorno attacks the kind of thinking that hypostatizes the dualistic division of human beings. puriﬁed of emotions.’’ Adorno argues that the more ‘‘efﬁcient’’ thought becomes. Adorno writes: ‘‘The assumption that thought proﬁts from the decay of the emotions. ‘‘Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated. The utterly pure reason of those who have divested themselves entirely of the ability ‘to conceive of an object even in its absence. however much it may expedite the task exacted from him.’’21 This division of work—allocating thought to one task and emotions to another. and desires. under the false presumption that thought can be more productive once it is disentangled from emotions—is yet another rendition of the ‘‘dialectic of enlightenment. Reason. or even that it remains unaffected. tends to reproduce and numbly accept the world without challenging it. smelling—are cut off. nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology. tasting. hypostasizes the dismemberment of man into functions’’ (127). touching. Adorno wants to unmask what appears to be a ‘‘natural condition’’ in order to reveal its historical speciﬁcity. atrophy once they are severed from each other. The social division of labour recoils on man. Even more explicitly. which dams the wellsprings of desire and splits human beings into separate functions: thinking versus feeling. In other words. The faculties. but are instead reduced to a set of truisms and a series of neurotic repetitions. In another aphorism. Thought itself becomes banal.’ converges with pure unconsciousness’’ (123).122
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lect sacriﬁces itself to a concept of itself that it worships self-destructively as a false god. that makes it possible to absolve and beautify the blockhead. ‘‘Sanitized thinking’’ is condemned to reiterate the known and reproduce that which already exists.

and is at the same time cancelled’’ (242). who fantasize about the transcendence of the knowing subject. The preceding quotes reﬂect a way of conveying thoughts that is characteristic of Adorno. Adorno insists. Adorno accuses Hegel of turning ‘‘belly into pure spirit. In his critique of philosophy. Adorno refers back to the body to viscerally evoke a critical stance: ‘‘The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass’’ (50). Elsewhere. and dismemberment are words that Adorno uses to remove his critique from an abstract mode of intellectual jargon and to place it into a material and physical mode of communication. One of the reasons that it is so difﬁcult to locate the body in Adorno’s work is lies in the oft-noted ‘‘subterranean inﬂuence of a Jewish religious theme on the materialism of the Frankfurt School. Castration.’’22 Susan Buck-Morss. vivisection. In another instance. revealingly. Adorno wryly describes how the dream of ‘‘pure spirit’’ of Hegel and other philosophers. For example. among others. substantive terms can also be ascribed to Adorno’s fundamental distrust of immediacy and his reliance on dialectical mediation.’’ impotent when it comes to thinking meaningfully about the surrounding world. it is through the mediating role of language that one ﬁnds the speciﬁcally corporal.’’ Adorno reverses Hegel and.’’23 In Adorno’s thought. slighted has an illumination as vivid as when agonizing pain lights up one’s own body’’ (164). has documented Adorno’s adherence to ‘‘the Jewish Bilderverbot. the sentient body.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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and world that leaves human beings ‘‘castrated. practicality. The irony being. of course.’’ seen in his refusal ‘‘to delineate the nature of utopia. in a manner of speaking. At one point. emotional body that I have described. can only be understood through the body—the feeling. not at the expense of. he repeatedly uses metaphors of the body in order to illustrate his most central points: ‘‘Someone who has been offended. sensitivity. this refusal to describe the body in positive. Such wariness stems from his familiar critique of identity thinking and
. Adorno uses these metaphors and images of the body to create a new philosophical language that moves toward a philosophy that has not excised emotion. returns spirit to the belly. Since Adorno never directly names the body or writes about it in a sustained fashion. evisceration. This manner of discourse shocks intellectually engaged readers into acknowledging their own corporeality. that this very process of knowing through the body annuls the notion of pure spirit. and curiosity precisely because it emerges from. that ‘‘only in the metaphor of the body can the concept of pure spirit be grasped at all. he often makes use of images or metaphors related to the mutilation of the body.

Mediation operates in various ways in Adorno’s thought.124
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what he describes as the ‘‘fanatical intolerance’’ of epistemological systems that transform the particular into abstract repetitions of the universal in their attempt to render objects unmediated and immediate.24 One of the central claims of Adorno’s polemic against philosophy—the ‘‘peddler of identity thinking’’—is that the language of philosophy yearns to get closer to the prelinguistic realm. and the curious. Philosophical/conceptual language represses. Often it is used in the traditional sense. Rather than writing directly about the body. more important. It is Friedrich Nietzsche—who reintroduces the body into the discourse of the social. points to the absence of. and cultural production of knowledge and who Adorno himself invokes in the foreword to Minima Moralia—who invites comparison with Adorno in the latter’s understanding of the body and playful use of metaphor. the concept of mediation becomes more complex. Adorno uses metaphors and visceral language to underscore its negativity. ‘‘has been the history of the repression of the body. is that this attempt does violence to the object. When language mediates. which is nonconceptual (begriffslos).’’ Nietzsche contends at the opening of The Gay Science. to mean that a third term is required to make a connection between two ideas. Nietzsche locates the malaise and sadism of reason in philosophy’s misguided approach. Mediation (Vermittlung) is the epistemological key to alleviating this problem. the body’s presence is articulated only through its absence. This is one way to understand the contradiction between the difﬁculty in precisely locating the body in Adorno’s writing. The problem. scientiﬁc. but.’’25 Like Adorno. using conceptual language in an attempt to capture the object. Language plays a mediating role by making the negative obvious. it does not merely act as an agent between two things. ‘‘The history of philosophy up to now. however. In Adorno’s typical dialectical fashion.’’ The treacherous and blind hostility of philosophers towards the senses—how much of mob and middle class there is in this ha-
. and eliminates the nonconceptual and asserts its identity. Adorno points out. In other instances. the object. and nonidentity inherent in. and in relation to language. marginalizes. unshakable sense of its omnipresence. It is this communication of negativity that acts as the critique of the failures of philosophy. He conveys this tartly in his pithy fragment ‘‘Why Philosophers Are Slanderers. and it is from here that he is able to launch his critique of philosophy.

.’’ In Nietzsche’s writings. Literary conventions such as parallax.26 Mistrusting the senses. is directed precisely at the attempts of philosophy to make mind the immutable and autonomous foundation of thought. Like Adorno. as discussed earlier.’’ repressing with barbarity the very nature upon which civilization depends. Nietzsche does not have a coherent theory of the body. a true turning point of Western thought. chiasm. Christian tradition that believes that man is a noble being by nature of his spirit. Both Nietzsche and Adorno can be understood as engaged in a project of attempting to jar human beings from a life of self-surrender. Nietzsche contrasts and distinguishes his own philosophy by describing it as following the ‘‘guiding thread of the body’’ (am Leitfaden des Leibes). According to Adorno. a malicious destruction of the valuations by which men live. if one wants a proof of how profoundly and thoroughly the actually barbarous needs of man seek satisfaction. the hypostasis of the mind. his style is intimately connected with the body.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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tred! . and he artfully uses physiological metaphors. parataxis.’’27 Adorno’s critique of philosophy. . to
. For Nietzsche. that is weakened by the precariousness of his spirit and conscious thought. especially those related to smell and digestion. Nietzsche is writing against a Platonic. and tautology are employed by both thinkers to stylistically avoid complicity with prevailing philosophical systems of discourse. his sureness of instinct. it is man’s animalism. Adorno’s thought parallels Nietzsche’s in certain respects.’’ One should take a look here at the ‘‘leitmotifs’’ of the entire evolution of philosophy:—a sort of revenge on reality. philosophers are engaged in a self-destructive ‘‘dialectic of enlightenment. Nietzsche’s ‘‘liberating act. Adorno owes much to Nietzsche’s antisystematic form of philosophy and his use of the essay form to cultivate a fragmentary and aphoristic syntax and style.28 This can be understood as effecting a linguistic ‘‘transvaluation of values. but instead relies on abundant metaphors of the body in order to emphasize its important role in the production of truth and knowledge. especially in regard to Nietzsche’s characterization of mass psychology and the masochistic elements of bourgeois rationality. an unsatisﬁed soul that feels the tamed state as torture and ﬁnds a voluptuous pleasure in a morbid unraveling of all the bonds that tie it to such a state. but unfortunately afﬂicted by one ﬂaw: the body. which seductively lead rational thought astray. even when he is tamed and ‘‘civilized.’’ is that he ‘‘refuses homage to the speculative concept.

Genealogy is therefore a history of the descent of a person or group from a common blood relation. a convenient ﬁction that helps to organize the chaos of bodily organic material
. In this way. For Nietzsche. The etymological root of the word—genea—is deﬁned as race or family. to overcome itself—are the source of the will to power. From the turmoil of bodily forces comes consciousness. psychological needs. to mature. the results of the body’s activities—passions. which is a process suffused with bodily implications and intimately associated with sexuality. By radically interrogating the validity of origins and evaluating how mere ‘‘things’’ become entrenched in society’s values and norms and become ‘‘facts.126
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criticize the ‘‘lie’’ about the autonomy of mind in epistemology. does not speciﬁcally place his arguments within the critique of capital. commands. and social ends. Consciousness is a direct effect of reactive forces attempting to regulate the body. Privileging the body in such a way emphasizes the notion that history is not simply a neutral record of an established reality. erleben. in the stage of gestation. Nietzsche describes his philosophy as a genealogy. einverleiben) are often used by Nietzsche to describe human interactions. hineinnehmen. live’. ‘‘What we experience and digest psychologically does not. and incorporate (verdauen.’’31 Consciousness and intellect are for him a passion or a bodily state like hunger or thirst. but instead uses the umbrella term bourgeois society. but rather an account that is the result of sexual desire.32 Nietzsche’s genealogical philosophy traces the ‘‘origin’’ and process by means of which something becomes legitimized by culture. ‘absorb.’’ it is acts as a critique of ideology. emerge into consciousness any more than what we ingest physically does. the struggle to survive. consciousness is a kind of necessary illusion: on the one hand. The body becomes the foundation for virtually all his metaphors and especially for thought itself. Nietzsche writes. The genealogical imperative—to unmask the ‘‘natural’’ as a result of historical human intervention bears a striking similarity to the critique of reiﬁcation—to show how relations between things that appear immutable and timeless began as relations between humans. In this respect. and imposes perspectives that help the body interact with other bodies. Nietzsche. He asserts: ‘‘Consciousness is an organ like the stomach. a force of domination that orders. of course. Genealogy traces the history of sexuality and bodies to reconstruct its particular account. instincts. for example.’’29 The gastric terms digest.’’30 And: ‘‘Our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive. genealogy can be ¨ understood as a problem of legitimization (Legitimitatsproblem).

’’ and ‘‘curiosity. ‘‘Those who read Nietzsche without laughing—without laughing often. is in fact a product of the body. what is called consciousness or mind. on the other hand. in the attempt to tap into some sort of ‘‘immediacy. an effect of the deﬂected will to power that instead of subduing other bodies and outside forces has turned inward and subdues itself. They are ﬁlled with what Nietzsche disparagingly calls a ressentiment.’’ ‘‘fantasy. Adorno’s passion for immanent criticism invades the object of his critique.’’ They counteract Western culture’s antag¨ onism to pleasure (Glucksfeindschaft). richly. Adorno retrieves this particular way of writing and thinking through the body from Nietzsche. Gilles Deleuze once wrote of Nietzsche. continually stressing the importance of mediation. Philosophy. the convergence of their styles of writing is also the location in which they are most divergent. psychology. Nietzsche argues.’’ These constitute what Adorno describes as ‘‘the Pleasure Principle of thought. Philosophy should not be simply an intellectual system of inquiry.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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and forces and. and more crucially in this case. rather than break apart. or self-reﬂection. I do not want to overstate the similarities between Adorno and Nietzsche here. While Nietzsche’s thought continually evades the codes and systems of civilization that he criticizes. should be suffused with ‘‘impulses. in contrast. while both thinkers contest the duality of body and spirit. Philosophers are the most guilty of this. is attempting to dialectically reconﬁgure the relationship between the two. modes of thinking.’’ Adorno understood intellectual history as a practice of retrieving those thinkers and thoughts. but a struggle and a battle. attempting to explode. This is a mistake because the psychical interior. Nietzsche’s inﬂuence on Adorno is best understood as what Adorno calls a ‘‘philosophy of retrieval. Rather than lifting any particular ideas or concepts from Nietzsche’s philosophy. Adorno’s labors are more somber and work from the inside out. Adorno argues in Minima Moralia.’’ ‘‘memory. Most important. a fear of the body’s activity and its vicissitudes and a ﬂeeing from the reality of life into the world of illusion. that have been systematically suppressed and repressed by the dominant modes of philosophy and forgotten by society. even hilariously—
.33 While Nietzsche philosophizes with a hammer. and forcefully attacks and criticizes. Nietzsche tends to reduce the human being to body. Paradoxically. Nietzsche despises the efforts of thinkers to look inward and examine consciousness through introspection.’’ Adorno. Adorno mimics Nietzsche’s use of language to evoke the body in order to formally and stylistically critique the autonomy of thought.

and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and offers astute observations about the reproduction of domination in the ‘‘masculine liberal competitive economy. The plaintive object of language is ‘‘the need to lend a voice to suffering. Adorno is writing ‘‘after Auschwitz. ‘‘more incidental music such as that with which the SS had tried to drown out the screams of its victims.’’ The feeling that Adorno’s language evokes is an immeasurable sense of sorrow and loss. there is a remarkable collection of eight fragments at the beginning of the second part of the work beginning with ‘‘Where the stork brings babies from’’ to ‘‘Since I set eyes on him. marriage.’’ When language does not function in this way.’’36 This act of admitting women into social activities to which they have previously been excluded is not a step toward emancipation. Adorno reﬂects on ‘‘the feminine character. Adorno is careful when describing the uniqueness of feminine experience.’’34 This concisely sums up the difference between Nietzsche’s ‘‘gay’’ and Adorno’s ‘‘melancholy’’ science.’’ that all address the question of sex and gender and the subordination of women. shaped.’’ and Nietzsche’s admonitions to give up guilt and bad conscience are fundamentally unthinkable for someone who feels ‘‘guilty solely by being alive. but formed. and marked by difference.’’35 Returning now to Minima Moralia. While acknowledging that women have a different experience in bourgeois society. to quote Adorno’s chilling formulation.’’ sexuality. most notably sexual difference. ‘‘The admittance of women to every conceivable supervised activity conceals continuing dehumanization. it becomes. a result of not only philosophical differences. In big business they remain what they were in the family. objects. This is. and what does Adorno have to say about this? Although I would not claim that Adorno was a protofeminist by any means.’’ Adorno suggests that allowing women to participate equally in such a society merely ‘‘levels the playing ﬁeld’’ to the point that both women and men can successfully achieve equal-opportunity dehumanization. He does not want to reify a particular deﬁnition of femaleness and fall into a discourse of identity. but also historical contexts. but rather an ill-fated gesture that weakens the ability of women to recognize the true extent of their oppression. in a sense not read Nietzsche at all. There are no other Adorno texts that offers such a detailed and sustained investigation of patriarchal bourgeois society and its repercussions.128
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have. of course. Femininity is not innate
. Which body is Adorno talking about? Bodies are not abstract. the question that begs to be asked is.

which pathologically asserts itself over bourgeois society. does so in her work The Second Sex where she describes the ontological process whereby ‘‘man’’ deﬁnes himself through the hierarchical contrast with an ‘‘Other’’ that is ‘‘woman. de Beauvoir shows how ‘‘man’’ assumes a universalistic position in this formulation. he does not suggest that the feminine is a binary or polar opposite of the masculine as is typically the case in postmodern theories of alterity. male ego’’ and that Woman represents the ‘‘other’’ to this masculine-gendered way of knowing.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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or natural. Otherness is reevaluated and recast by Adorno as a form of negativity that is so charged that it jars us from passively accepting claims of totality by reminding us that the so-called totality is actually incomplete.’’37 Adorno comes startling close to naming Woman as the ‘‘second sex.’ ’’38 This is what Adorno means when he describes the ‘‘feminine character’’ as ‘‘a negative imprint of domination.’’ Mapping the Hegelian master/slave dialectic onto male-female relations. or in other words. Adorno acknowledges that the disembodied. of course. Kate Soper concisely sums it up this way: ‘‘The whole is not masculine. ‘‘the whole is the false. but a result of the inscription of women’s oppression. ‘‘The Femininity which appeals to instinct. narcissistic. However. The feminine in Adorno’s reading is of an otherness that consistently disrupts the totalizing concept of masculinity. Adorno differentiates himself from these
. and feminine negativity surfaces as the immanent refusal and critique of this supposed ‘truth. he also insists that ‘‘the concept of gender can never be fully adequate to its masculine object. de Beauvoir goes on to claim that the price men pay for representing the universal is a kind of loss of embodiment. Whereas the price women pay is an immanent existence deﬁned by her conﬁnement to the body.’’ No longer shackled to the subject as deﬁned in the Master-Slave relationship.’’ A variety of theorists. whereas ‘‘woman’’ is doomed to the contingent and subordinate status of the ‘‘second sex.’’ In other words. have identiﬁed negativity as the feminine. is always exactly what every woman has to force herself by violence—masculine violence—to be: a she man. affect-free epistemological systems privilege the ‘‘wholly autonomous. both feminists and nonfeminists. and women are embodied and consigned to immanence. while Adorno does interpret the feminine as the ‘‘other’’ to the masculine. Men are disembodied and gain their entitlement to transcendence. These are two asymmetrical corporeal situations that Adorno recognizes.’’ Simone de Beauvoir.’’ Clinging to the notion that transcendence in general is equal to transcendence of the body.

This ﬁnally brings me to Adorno’s most sustained reﬂection on the dialectical relationship of theory and praxis. in ‘‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis. beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one’s own. which. therefore. As he insists. The difference between the feminine and the masculine would still be relational but without being hierarchical. For Adorno. Liberation must be examined as a reconcilement of the antagonism between the two that preserves difference. epistemological. His tone is uncharacteristically agitated. Liberation also does not include the obliteration of any differences that might exist between the two. would merely give her equal access to dehumanization in a reiﬁed society.’’ Adorno wrote this essay during the period of student protest. and one senses how besieged he must have felt. But even as he caricatures students and their hostility toward theory as selﬁsh. demanding.’’ the true object of his criticism is.’’41 Healing the severed relationship means placing them back into a dialectical relationship. remains what is distant and different. which he calls a ‘‘delusional’’ form of ‘‘mystiﬁed praxis’’ (Scheinpraxis). His defense of theory. is really an offensive against forms of thinking that bifurcate the mind and body through the fetishization of intellectual labor over physical labor. is not conceived as making woman equal to man. which Adorno characterizes as a manifestation of the fear of reason and autonomy. which is another form of belittling manual labor. and ideological motives.
. therefore. negativity is not simply the opposite of some afﬁrmative state.130
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thinkers in a crucial way. once again. Adorno refuses to align himself with those who express an aversion to praxis. and ‘‘snotty nosed. Instead its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien. In this way. ‘‘Total contradiction is nothing but the manifested untruth of total identiﬁcation. in the proximity it is granted. Adorno unpacks the long history of tension between theory and praxis to reveal how deeply entangled their division is with emotional. and it is addressed to the critics of his unrelenting belief in the transformative potential and power of critical theory. the philosophical tradition that has privileged thinking and reﬂection over action.39 He eschews binary opposition when he describes the subject-object relation between male and female in favor of negative dialectics. as I have discussed.’’40 Liberation. As Adorno describes it: ‘‘The reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. or with those who express enmity toward theory (Theoriefeindschaft). The essay is usually regarded as a strong attack against student activism.

he represents yet another historical instance that makes evident something that was always already a part of the dialectic of enlightenment. and subject and object.’’ Descartes’s meditations became the wellspring of classical rationalism. which privileged the conceptual or mental over the corporeal. Descartes’s cogito—I think. has become so calciﬁed in contemporary culture and society that its rigid structure deﬁnes virtually all modern and postmodern philosophical thought.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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In typical Adorno fashion. He insists that the theory-and-praxis relationship needs to be understood as a rupture between mind and body. had its beginnings in the ´ seventeenth century. he complicates things in order to make them more transparent. Adorno and Horkheimer describe how the division of mind and body devolves from the division of labor. in the context of Western civilization. literature for the ﬁrst time portrayed praxis as a dubious undertaking on account of its tension with reﬂection. the sailors are bound to physical work by rowing the boat.44 Although Descartes is widely given the dubious credit of being the ﬁrst modern philosopher to articulate and canonize the dualism of mind and body. shifting the focus in science and philosophy from the object of knowledge to the knowing subject. referred to as Cartesian dualism. While Odysseus restrains his body by chaining himself to the mast in order to contemplate and experience the Siren song. Like a set of Russian dolls in which each small ﬁgurine rests within another larger version of itself.43 Furthermore. This hierarchy of mind over body. rather. when Rene Descartes uttered his famous ‘‘Cogito ergo sum. therefore. I am—places the emphasis on the subject. he is by no means its ‘‘originator’’. Adorno writes. In the oft-quoted passage on the encounter between Odysseus and the Sirens. ‘‘Praxis arose from labor. ‘‘At the same time as the Cartesian doctrine of two substances ratiﬁed the dichotomy of subject and object. the complex relationship between theory and praxis is necessarily understood when nested within these other questions. In the myth of Odysseus. the Hegelian master/slave dialect is reinterpreted as a narrative about both self-preservation and the division of mental and physical labor. In Adorno’s essay on theory and praxis. thereby extracting the body from the production of knowledge. a trope that will be repeated throughout history. intellectual and physical labor. The division of mind and body asserts itself here in its primordial form—as a division of labor. It attained its
.’’42 In the general imagination. he suggests how this tenuous relationship to work inﬂuences how we regard the contemplative art of thinking and the act of doing. the division of the human being into a mind-body dualism.

like Adorno’s understanding of negativity. Rejecting the characterization of theory as a ﬂight away from action. theory a form of praxis’’ (261). Theory steals itself back from the system’s immanence only where it shirks its pragmatic fetters. . the effort to keep oneself from being deceived any
. but proactive. ‘‘Thinking is a doing. Adorno describes the dialectical relationship between theory and praxis by describing what it is not. Thought should not be considered to be passive. Once we begin to think about the relationship between theory and praxis as discontinuous. which bears upon the totality if it does not want to be futile. not transition. Adorno explains: ‘‘The relationship between theory and practice after both have once distanced themselves from each other is that of qualitative reversal. ‘‘If in the end. ‘‘[T]hought itself is already a sign of resistance. Adorno is arguing against the ‘‘ﬁrst theory and then action’’ mentality. In other words. Or as Horkheimer put it. ‘‘theory. praxis would be unnecessary. Contemporary actionism also represses the fact that the longing for freedom is closely related to the aversion to praxis. which has been historically constituted as a form of unfreedom. Its descent from labor is a heavy burden for all of praxis. it allows us to also get away from the notion that one must necessarily lead to the other. What do we do now? He vehemently rejects the position that theory should be beholden to pragmatic questions.’’ In a compassionate and just society. theory is the guarantor of freedom in the midst of unfreedom’’ (265). nor is it desirable. ‘‘Despite all of its unfreedom. . which also no longer lends itself to a process of valorization. then the same thing befalls it despite its belief that it escapes the immanence of the system. In other words. This distinction Adorno makes is directed towards the misrepresentation of the theory and praxis relationship as a temporal continuity. Adorno suggests that theory is yet another form of emancipatory practice. is tied down to its effectiveness here and now. It is not possible. Adorno argues against the notion that theory must lead to concrete action and answer the question. . for theory to prescribe praxis. praxis.’’ Adorno argues.132
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concept when labor no longer wanted to merely reproduce life directly but to produce its conditions: and this clashed with the already existing conditions. Above all.’’45 The aversion towards praxis results from its association with physical work. and surely not subordination’’ (277). no matter how modiﬁed they may be’’ (260). is a result of ‘‘the wrong state of things. Thinking and critique are inalienable and real modes of behavior in oppressive times.

one derives a sense of security from acting as a group. Adorno reveals here his fear and suspicion of mass movements of any kind. the accusation that theory is a traitor to social¨ ism (Verrater am Sozialismus) because it is obscure.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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longer. The actionism of the time was under the spell of illusory or mystiﬁed praxis (Scheinpraxis). It is important to stress that Adorno is not arguing that theory should ignore concrete social realities or withdraw into an isolated ivory tower. This type of actionism. the proletariat. thereby unleashing a radical imagination that allows us to simultaneously give voice to suffering and preserve hope. Adorno argues. ‘‘so long as the meditation is not taken in hand by praxis and tailored to ﬁt the results it enjoins. once again. ‘‘The requirement that theory should kowtow to praxis dissolves theory’s truth content and condemns praxis
. It is the tension of the contradiction and interplay of their relationship to each other that productively generates any possibility of movement and change. Adorno writes.’’46 At the same time.’’ Adorno writes with faith but then adds with caution. Adorno also defends theory against the so-called ivorytower argument. This is. an extension of his argument against identity thinking. which he described as ‘‘jumping into the melting pot of action. The student revolts were viewed by Adorno as a form of Scheinpraxis. He suggests that the very notion of a traitor implies that there is a repressive collective identity at work attempting to liquidate any inkling of autonomy. and incomprehensible to the mass majority of people. who believed in the great potential of a revolutionary collective consciousness. Adorno’s tone becomes impatient when addressing this argument. a repressive collective act that liquidates voluntarism and individuality. for whom it claims to speak.’’47 In the essay. This is something about which he consistently disagreed and clashed with Walter Benjamin. ‘‘Every meditation upon freedom extends into the conception of its possible realization. theory and praxis are not entirely identical. sheltered from true individuality. presupposes a free and autonomous agent that could not possibly exist in an administered society. When one participates in Scheinpraxis. Instead it should throw itself into the art of compelling change through dialectical critique. Adorno laments the loss of the possibility of real praxis (richtige Praxis). namely.’’ At one point. Conﬂating the two is just as problematic as separating them. isolationist. This is the predominant form of praxis that Adorno saw at work when he was writing the essay. which is a form of self-determined activity that springs from human spontaneity.

Even Marcuse. in that ‘‘if praxis obscures its own present impossibility with the opiate of collectivity. strength. it is high time to voice this. in practical terms. who became the malcontent of the Frankfurt School because of his vociferous support and participation in social-protest movements. nonsensical nature of screaming. . because he understands it as a reﬂex of necessity (Lebensnotwendigkeit—literally. where the pleasure. ‘‘Choice! Choice! Choice!’’ at antichoice. because it acts as an opiate that alters consciousness. whereas practice is susceptible to delusion. and empowerment I felt while collectively marching and shouting until my voice was raw did not completely dispel my bewilderment at the unproductive. of course. Adorno’s harshest criticism of praxis is that it masks the reality of the situation. it becomes in its turn ideology.’’ Marcuse insisted. my desire to join the march was compelled by a sense of urgency and the necessity of the times. ‘‘even if revolutionary practice deviates from its proper path.. A modicum of madness furnishes collective movements—.’’49 Theory and thought have the ability to maintain a critical focus. intoxicating and numbing the actor to the true extent of his or her oppression and the misery of his or her circumstances.C. on 22 April 2004.’’48 Adorno often uses words such as madness (Wahnsinn) and mania (Wahn) when describing mass action. The dizzying pleasure of collective unity was also tinged with the critical perspective of women and men who have been ﬁghting for a women’s right to choice for a very long time. And he would. It is important to note that Adorno does not completely disparage praxis. antiabortion activists who were on the sidelines screaming back ‘‘What about the baby’s choice? What about the baby’s choice?’’ Adorno recognized this tendency when he wrote: ‘‘Instead of arguments one meets standardized slogans. ‘‘Theory will preserve the truth. never abandoned his unfailing belief in the principal role of critical theory. which apparently are distributed by leaders and their acolytes. most recently at the March for Women’s Lives in Washington.134
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to delusion. . As long as it was acknowledged on some level that ‘‘[t]he
. with their sinister power of attraction. and the unpalatable and exasperated feeling that we needed to do it yet once again. not begrudge a march on Washington or an antiwar rally. D.’’51 At the same time.’’50 Praxis quickly becomes yet another form of ideology. ‘‘resourcefulness of life’’) that acts as a defense mechanism. People protect themselves from resignation and hopelessness with praxis. I know I myself have fallen under this collective enchantment. It becomes easier to accept one’s situation when empowered by the false sense that one is actually doing something.

only one side of the dualist axis.’’52 Instead of being a form of ‘‘crisis management’’ that simply reinforces conformity. threatening.53 For women. reduced to. but instead moves toward placing them back into a dialectical relation. maternity rights. as it is commonly understood. pureness. real praxis works toward the moment of its own dispensability—the utopian state in which there would be no real need for such praxis. is the belief in a real and true essence of things. Adorno’s critique of epistemology is an effort to reconcile mind and body through a process that does not reify or collapse difference. or intention—freed from material constraints is radically challenged by the negativity of the body. and tempting characteristics of the ﬂesh have been culturally encoded as female. and projected as the body. The students’ action that day was directed toward theory as it is understood as a sort of ‘‘male fantasy. however. the body has been the locus of essence. It is troubling in a way that the body seems to always play a central role in feminist theory. How does any of this illuminate the wacky event of the bared breasts. spirit. . The body conjures up allegations of ahistoricity. of course. Feminist struggles have hovered over issues related to the body—contraception. the right to abortion. there has also been a lingering ambivalence about casting women’s oppression and liberation in corporeal terms. This is one of Adorno’s valuable insights. contaminating. This is. essentialism. my initial point of departure? The central tension that prompted the students to act out against Adorno arises from a ﬁssure situated between theory and praxis. rape. cannot be predicated on a separation from the body. The humbling. pornography . freeing her from an essential notion of herself. and signals the accompanying notion that there are invariable and ﬁxed properties that deﬁne the ‘‘whatness’’ of a given entity.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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goal of real praxis would be its own abolition. body image. Liberation and freedom. self-defense. both the ‘‘splinter
. Woman’s liberation seems to be predicated precisely on women being freed from this identity with the body. However. a negativity or absence that is made obvious only in its uncomfortable presence in the intellectual space of the seminar room that day. and transcendence being the other. Women have been linked with. and biologism—loaded terms that feminists might rather avoid. The body is.’’ The delusion of an autonomous intellect—whether conceived of as pure reason. Praxis works toward its own abolition: a utopian point at which praxis becomes obsolete. Essentialism. to borrow Adorno’s formulation. the characteristics of nobility. .

(My translation.’’56
Notes
1. this state of total disjunction and alienation is undesirable. this reconciliation remains a utopian promise. this fact has consequences for the relation of theory and practice. . 418. it entrusts itself to its own experience. in which neither is granted priority over one or the other. the division of intellectual and manual labor or of subject and object. emotional. In recent discourse. or what Adorno calls the ‘‘preponderance of the object.136
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in the eye’’ and the ‘‘best magnifying glass. ‘‘Incommensurability is the only way. Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail (Hamburg: Rogner and Bernhard. is found in the reconciliation of mind and body through mediation. theory/praxis and subject/object—gives expression to the ideological. however.’’54 For Adorno. the tension between theory and praxis. and whether it is the troubled relationship between mind and body. . in the current reiﬁed society. these dualisms remain examples of ‘‘torn halves of an integral freedom. While the students challenged this mode of identity thinking with the immediacy of the body. Adorno evocatively describes this process: ‘‘Approaching knowledge of the object is the act in which the subject rends the veil it is weaving around the object. fearlessly passive.’’ Adorno’s important insight about the various incarnations of this dualism—mental/physical labor. Difference between the two is preserved without doing violence to the object by liquidating its otherness. the solution.’’55 Adorno’s use of language here is highly suggestive—an experience that verges on erotic surrender. It can do this only where. ‘‘to resist the powerful sway of the subject and preserve any semblance of difference in the object. Even as he wants to retain the moment of nonidentity between subject and object and avoid granting priority to either. not its constituent. for Adorno. to which they do not add up. and epistemological forces that are invested in these ruptures. Critical in the preceding quote is the emphasis on the passivity of the subject and of thought itself. This kind of reciprocal relationship between subject and object maintains a ﬁdelity to the object. 1998).’’ Reconciliation is therefore understood as the moment of nonidentity. The subject is the object’s agent.)
. . Ultimately. Quoted by Wolfgang Kraushaar.’’ one critic writes. the notion of incommensurability has gathered steam as a way of discussing the object without giving in to the compulsion of the self-identity of the subject. he also wants to place them within a relationship of reciprocity.

‘‘Resignation. hooks. enact a perverse Oedipal drama and direct their rage against mothers and obliterate them. 12. ¨ 3. 20. 16. 18.’’ 8. 416. 23. 14. 25. ﬂustered and humiliated. For a more in-depth description of the event and the sensationalized press coverage the following day. 6. Floods. George L. 122. Minima Moralia. ‘‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis. Minima Moralia. Rosen in Munchner Merkur. who. 1978). 11. Sontag further argues that the repressed sexual energy could then be transformed and channeled into the orgiastic worship of the leader. It recapitulates many points of another essay that I will examine at length in this chapter. 26–27 April 1969.’’ in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. 26. The Case of California (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1923–1950 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mosse. 1991). Hanser. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in Switzerland about four months later. Floods. 15. 1982). 23. Quoted by A. vol. 242. Theodor W. Die Suddeutsche Zeitung. 10. Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from a Damaged Life. Strauss and Giroux. 21.The Bared-Breasts Incident
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¨ 2. Adorno. B. The Will to Power. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage. 1986). 102. Friedrich Nietzsche. 1974). F. Klaus Theweleit. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno.’’ New Frontiers 17 (Summer 1992): 26. Die Frankfurter Schule: Geschichte. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1973). Laurence A. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge. 26 April 1969. ed. 2004). 26–27 April 1969. see Rolf Wiggershaus. 1985). and he canceled the seminar until further notice. ‘‘Temporary Shelter: Adorno’s Exile and the Language of Home. Rickels.’’ 157. 12. ¨ 5.K. U. bell hooks. 4. ‘‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness. 1977). trans. Theodor Adorno. politische Bedeutung (Frankfurt: C. 1968). ‘‘Fascinating Fascism. Adorno. Further page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text. History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. E. 22. trans. See Susan Sontag. Friedrich Nietzsche. Martin Jay. 10. 13. Theweleit. Adorno. trans. For Theweleit.: Harvester. Women. ‘‘what it means’’ is the psychic roots of violence. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Bodies.’’ which originated as a radio lecture. 48–66. Against Epistemology—a Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies. 18. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research. Adorno. which he locates in middleclass men. trans.’’ in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrer. 19. 17. also deals with the troubled relationship between theory and praxis. History. 1972). 33. Die Suddeutsche Zeitung. Constraints of space do not allow me to offer an in-depth analysis of one other essay that bears mentioning. 253. The title is a play on a Jesuit maxim expressed by Loyola: ‘‘Dei sacriﬁcium intellectus’’ (To subordinate the intellect to obedience is to offer the highest sacriﬁce to God). Adorno immediately left the lecture hall. Jephcott (New York: Verso.
. 13. 1982). 9. N. 24. 32. 1. 10. ‘‘Choosing the Margin. Jamie Owen Daniel. 1987). Male Fantasies. Minima Moralia. 635. Minima Moralia. 150. Walter Benjamin. Susan Buck-Morss. Women. Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 317. John Cummings (New York: Continuum. Bodies. trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage. faced with the psychic trauma of absent Fathers. The Gay Science. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno. 7. 24. 56. theoretische Entwicklung. 157. and the Frankfurt Institute (Hassocks.

but can it direct a revolution? From Plato to the deconstructionists it has been treated primarily as aesthetic representation. including the aesthetic. may simulta-
. biological. and may have gone furthest in combining the multiple aspects of mimesis.7
Mimetic Moments
Adorno and Ecofeminism
D. Adorno continued to use the term throughout his career. and anthropological. Bruce Martin
Mimesis has played a variety of roles in the history of philosophy. in key passages of Dialectic of Enlightenment. as Adorno emphasized. while science emphasizes its power to explain adaptive and evolutionary behavior. which. Mimesis in its various manifestations has had both repressive and emancipatory implications. The early Frankfurt School critical theorists used mimesis from the beginning.

’’1
. and critical theory more speciﬁcally. is raised up on the basis of actual domination. except for those heavily inﬂuenced by ecological science and the environmental movement who have often asserted that their biological interpretations of the term have immediate.142
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neously exist side by side philosophically and culturally.
Mimesis and Political Thought
In the key essay ‘‘The Concept of Enlightenment. domination in the conceptual sphere. Adorno’s understanding of the relationship of mimesis to ‘‘natural beauty’’ will be visited for his perspective on possibilities for moving beyond situations of social-political domination and ecological destruction. In their use of mimesis. Following is an excursion ﬁrst into the beginnings of the use of mimesis in philosophy. Horkheimer and Adorno focus on myth and philosophy. to establish the long-standing relationship between reason and domination. both in texts and in the world generally. Together with mimetic magic. .’’ contained in the pivotal text of Frankfurt School critical theory. From Hitler’s Fascism to Homer’s Odyssey. The individuality that learned order and subordination in the subjection of the world. sometimes labeled a form of ecofeminism. Finally. . important psychological or psychoanalytic uses of mimesis have functioned for both feminists and critical theorists as a crucial support for broader philosophical claims with political implications. feminists and ecofeminists have tended to emphasize aesthetic representation. The critical theorists draw important distinctions in how domination is manifested in these various modes of representation and how mimesis provides the crucial link and difference between them. it tabooed the knowledge which really concerned the object. and magic and science. connections between representation and repression are revealed to the extent that the claim can be made that ‘‘[t]he universality of ideas as developed by discursive logic. In addition. transparent implications for social and political theory. soon wholly equated truth with the regulative thought without whose ﬁxed distinctions universal truth cannot exits. then into the problems and potentials of the scientiﬁc meanings of the term. the Dialectic of Enlightenment. . before a ﬁnal arrival at Luce Irigaray’s mimetic critique of philosophy.

. and conceptual domination. What the stubborn persistence of aesthetic mimesis proves is . it is the most sublimated manifestation of mimicry. Art keeps alive the memory of endsoriented reason. magic ritual. before we move to its other forms. Adorno returned to mimesis and its potential to resist the history of domination and its actuality in the present. The mathematical formula is regression handled consciously. .
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In the same originating text of critical theory. . reﬁned into observed regularity. In their discussion of biological adaptation. His focus is ﬁnally on the relationship of mimesis and art. that to this day rationality has never been fully realized. and (eco)feminism. and the emancipatory moment of the mimetic: Mimetic behaviour is a receptacle for all that has been violently lopped off from and repressed in man by centuries of civilization. However. . nearly completed work. Its is the gaze that transforms empirical being into imagery.’’2 The relationship between the repressive and emancipatory moments of mimesis in Adorno’s subsequent philosophical and ‘‘aesthetic’’ work will continue to resemble the early critical theorists’ treatment of science and technology. they conclude: ‘‘Science is repetition. Aesthetic behaviour is the ability to see more in things than they are. and preserved in stereotypes. . rationality understood in the sense of an agency in the service of mankind and of human potentials. just as magic ritual used to be. it may be helpful ﬁrst to retrace one of the earliest uses of mimesis in the construction of social and political theory. in its philosophical and aesthetic beginnings. . Horkheimer and Adorno turned to the workings of repressive mimesis expressed in antiSemitism. . in order to set the background for viewing the relationship of mimesis to ecological politics. In his last. . . perhaps even of ‘‘humanized nature’’ (Marx). . Early mimesis in magic and sacriﬁce have ‘‘developed’’ into ever more elaborate forms of domination. the fundamental argument depending on a complex understanding of the transformations of mimesis. philosophical representation.3 Several commentators and critics have noted that even though mimesis has been most closely linked to aesthetic philosophy. . the critical theorists used it to travel a much more anthropological and sociohistorical path. beginning with Plato and Aristotle. including those of science and psychological projection.

more recently in language and technological reproduction. in learning language. mimesis plays a central role in the constitution of the just political system. it is unarguable that Plato does use mimesis as a principle of exclusion. It is for this ‘‘aesthetic’’ sense of mimesis in philosophy that Adorno’s work. Although there are technical arguments over how many types of mimesis exist in Plato. The very ability to perceive similarities or resemblances is a manifestation of ‘‘the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. is most frequently criticized. to be like the other. but for speciﬁcally what is represented: suffering. The mimetic faculty is one of the most basic of human activities and is present generally in nature. Adorno’s inclusions of mimesis frequently commence with reference to Walter Benjamin. thus undermining the basis of the just state: Reason.’’5 This compulsion to imitate. whose short essay ‘‘On the Mimetic Faculty’’ begins not with an appeal to Greek discussions of literature but to Nature: nature itself produces similarities. or if it merely has been transformed. including in child’s play. The poet. and in attempting to assume social roles such as that of a doctor or a teacher.144
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In Plato’s Republic. and the instinctual desires that lead those of good character away from knowledge and truth. So the poets must be banned. including language. irrationality. whereby the child not only imitates adults. initially being found in dance and magic. but also imitates objects.4 In book 10 of the Republic. but the basis for its earliest use came as much from anthropology or biology as from the tradition of aesthetic philosophy. He answers by discussing the historical transformation of the mimetic faculty and its ability to recognize and produce ‘‘nonsensuous similarity. not for mimesis itself. such as making the motions of a train or a windmill. painter.’’ connecting
. Plato explains that the poets and similar artists must be excluded from the just state because their representations excite the emotions and encourage irrationality. For Benjamin the mimetic faculty is a subterranean force within even the most developed forms of human activity. especially his Aesthetic Theory. and others who evoke an emotional response set a bad example for those who love truth. According to Benjamin. who must rely solely on reason to gain access to the true knowledge necessary for the properly run polis. He asks whether the mimetic faculty has continued to decay from its ubiquitous place in the magic and enchantment of ancient peoples. for example. this ‘‘gift’’ of recognizing and producing similarities has changed historically. is exhibited in human behavior in the earliest years.

the compulsion to become the Other—and if. as will become clear below. modernity has ushered in a veritable rebirth. yield into and become Other. a recharging and retooling (of) the mimetic faculty. he argued.7 (This invitation to ‘‘release through imitative distance’’ is also a theme of Irigaray’s work.) From its earliest uses by the critical theorists to its more recent recognition by those who have drawn on their insights. we will ﬁnd distance from the imitated. in addition to Adorno and Horkheimer. imitate. especially the relationship between ecofeminism and ecological science. that is. exploring the context of the colonizer and colonized. understands the mimetic faculty as ‘‘the nature that culture uses to create second nature. This alternative writing would have implications for political practice.’’6 Taussig probes the history of mimesis and the ‘‘mimesis of history. has both repressive and emancipatory potentials and is to be understood. thanks to new social conditions and new techniques of reproduction (such as cinema and mass production of imagery). then it seems to me that we are forthwith invited if not forced into the inner sanctum of mimetic mysteries where. these new inﬂuences could restructure the fundamental determinants of the objects and purposes of science and
. of course. Michael Taussig.’’ The new social movements had the potential.’’ This capacity.’’ the telling of the story of possibility of social transformation: If I am correct in invoking a certain magic of the signiﬁer and what Walter Benjamin took the mimetic faculty to be—namely. to create a new set of social and economic inﬂuences that could reshape the actual practice of science and technology. in its more ‘‘shamanistic’’ uses.Mimetic Moments
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mimetic magic’s ﬂash of recognition of our similarity to the ‘‘other’’ to its now central manifestation in language. have expanded on Benjamin’s insight. in imitating. mimesis provides both a critique of the positivist understanding of knowledge and the potential for an alternative philosophical writing. Marcuse foresaw the potential of the women’s and ecology movements for pursuing transformative politics and also called for a ‘‘New Science’’ and ‘‘New Technology. as a form of ‘‘sympathetic magic’’ in which ‘‘the wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power. explore difference. make models. the faculty to copy. A number of commentators.

including the irrevocable disintegration of planetary ecology. of thought in its object. A question that is key for radical ecology and ecofeminism. This is clearly what
. scientiﬁc-technological development is best viewed as closely approximating Adorno’s view of history: modern ecological history is the history of catastrophe.146
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technology. destroying human ‘‘civilization’’ if not the species itself. while recognizing the limits of existing conventions of science and its product—technology. is whether a new science and new technology can be brought into existence.’’9 Feminists and others have developed alternative understandings of objectivity and have shown that ‘‘reliable knowledge of nature’’ can be produced without limiting science to the role of ‘‘shop foreman’’ in the full extension of the domination of nature through instrumental rationality. Natural evolution has not come to an end. As Mary Mellor explains this central dilemma for ecofeminism. One of the central efforts of ecofeminism has been combining the insights of feminism with those of science. ‘‘While feminism has historically sought to explain and overcome women’s association with the natural. As some radical ecologists and ecofeminists now argue. of an instrumental rationality whereby means become the ends of reason. but takes on new forms in the dialectic of history and nature. Taussig explains how Adorno shows in various contexts that ‘‘the sensuous moment of knowing includes a yielding and mirroring of the knower in the unknown. The insights of critical theory support the ecofeminist and generally radical ecological perspective that nature is best viewed not as a collection of objects for manipulation and control. and that always exceeds existing conceptualization. ecology is attempting to re-embed humanity in its natural framework. Nontraditional methods and theories of science producing reliable knowledge of nature could be encouraged with a fundamental transformation of society. The categories and concepts that guide radical ecologists’ interaction with nature tend to develop differently from those of a science and technology harnessed to the ideology of industrial production and continuous growth.8 A clearer understanding of our present predicament comes from understanding that evolution has become primarily a regressive and repressive devolution. as it was for the early critical theorists. it is even possible that this devolution may culminate in a ﬁnal catastrophic global ecological collapse. through the destruction of species and the potential destruction of entire ecosystems. From a radical ecological perspective. but as a profound process that develops in not entirely predictable directions.

is in the center of much of Horkheimer and Adorno’s elusive discussion of mimesis. in a complex and ‘‘dialectical’’ manner. philosophy would truly give itself rather than use them as a mirror in which to reread itself. In the context of the philosophy of Negative Dialectics. to the fundamental difﬁculties and promises of conceptualization. to show that science as a social institution tends to select those individuals whose emotional needs are met by the rhetoric of domination and aggression. this bodily mirroring of otherness and even ideas. It would be nothing but full. one without the term mimesis. the immersion of the self in the other. Keller contends that science does not have to put itself in the service of ‘‘instrumentalism. As Taussig indicates. Adorno claims: The changed philosophy itself would be inﬁnite in the sense of scorning solidiﬁcation in a body of enumerable theorems. unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reﬂection. This produces certain types of knowledge and power relative to the objects of knowledge and to the new and unknown. to those objects.’’12 Evelyn Keller uses a different language.’’14 Keller cites several scientists. and precisely in the activist possibilities within such yielding lie serious issues of mimesis and science. ‘‘The need to dominate nature is.Mimetic Moments
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Adorno often has in mind with his many references to mimesis.15 She
. ‘‘This strange mixture of activity and passivity involved in yielding-knowing. so it seems to me.’’ that there is an alternative understanding of the methods of science that still produces reliable knowledge about the world but does so by respecting the integrity of that which it studies. of his entire system.13 Like the critical theorists. in this view. a projection of the need to dominate other human beings. the obscure operator. Its substance would lie in the diversity of objects that impinge upon it and of the objects it seeks. both male and female. a loosening of boundaries of identity. mimesis as an alternative science. whereas even the ‘‘science of empirical consciousness’’ reduced the contents of such experience to cases of categories.11 Adorno. also connects mimesis to science and psychology. who claim to have recognized an alternative method of acquiring reliable knowledge.’’10 This ‘‘dialectical’’ way of knowing involves a ‘‘yielding’’ to the other. it arises not so much out of empowerment as out of anxiety about impotence. a diversity not wrought by any schema. mistaking its own image for concretion.

of renewed confrontation with fateful necessity.16 What Keller ﬁnds most interesting about McClintock. of truth and. and theory development. ‘‘Mythology itself set off the unending process of enlightenment in which ever and again.
. in the hands of a society dominated by the exchange principle as broadly understood.’’19 The tendency toward ever increasing domination is not conﬁned to science or only directed toward external nature. but it does so at the expense of the uniqueness of each individual. is also a story of the return into the mythic.148
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writes extensively about Barbara McClintock as an exemplar of this alternative understanding and possibility for science.’’ is how McClintock’s alternative vision of science translates into differences in methodology. science attempts to demythologize or disenchant the world. concepts.’’ If philosophy is to break the hold of the logic of domination. Science in its repressive forms is extended into a means for the control of human nature as well.’’ that is. with its conﬁnement of subjectivity to rational calculation. every speciﬁc theoretic view succumbs to the destructive criticism that it is only a belief—until even the very notions of spirit. besides that the latter does not view herself as ﬁghting for a ‘‘feminist science. what Adorno understands as ‘‘identity thinking. a specimen available for control and manipulation. McClintock received the Nobel Prize for discovering ‘‘genetic transposition. enlightenment itself. have become animistic magic.18 In this science the unique or exceptional is not seen simply as an example that proves or disproves a general law. then it must become aware of the alternative possibilities of thought lodged in the repressed fragments of mimesis that remain. Science.’’17 In McClintock’s case. the respect for difference meant focusing attention on an ‘‘aberrant pattern of pigmentation on a few kernels of a single corn plant’’ and the subsequent six years of research to explain the observation. indeed. transforms the individual into a mere instance of universal processes. she established that genetic elements can move in large organisms (greater than single cell) in an apparently coordinated way from one part of a chromosome to another. with the inevitability of necessity. Keller views this alternative vision of science as based in a ‘‘respect for difference. but is also the tendency of philosophy. from myth to enlightenment. thus challenging the orthodoxy of modern genetics.’’ For the critical theorists. but as an opportunity to make those exceptions or differences meaningful ‘‘in and of themselves. and it thus acquires the characteristics of the very nature it ﬁrst wanted to control. The history of ‘‘development’’ from magic to science.

especially those conjunctions of dominations that include women? Can the nature that is used by culture to create second nature be transformed once more to become the ‘‘culture used by nature to rescue nature. and it unconsciously obeys the idea of making amends to the pieces for what it has done. The parallels with Fascist arguments of the 1930s are too close to be ignored and can be very fruitfully subjected to the same criticism that the early Frankfurt School applied to the German situation.20 A repeated concern of critics of some versions of radical ecology has been the tendency to use ecological science in a sociobiologistic way that has all the overtones of a new racism.Mimetic Moments
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While doing violence to the object of its syntheses. In philosophy.’’ to end its unnecessary destruction and pointless suffering? Is it possible to
. Accompanying irreconcilable thoughts is the hope for reconcilement. as Horkheimer and Adorno repeatedly emphasize. Racism is infused with the mimetic.21 A basic question for a critical radical ecology. threatening the existence of complex life on the planet. the commanding freedom of the subject. Anti-Semitism and racism share with Fascism the use of mimesis to direct the mimetic faculty. because the resistance of thought to mere things in being. intends in the object even that which the object was deprived by objectiﬁcation. our thinking heeds a potential that waits in the object. or ecofeminism. becoming truly global. analyzed by the critical theorists as the ‘‘organized control of mimesis. ever old directions useful for domination. then. and the link between technoscientiﬁc logic and the Holocaust was a constant theme of the early critical theorists. The most often cited demonstration of the repressive power of mimesis is that of anti-Semitism. whereby stereotypical imitation becomes a means of domination and repression. Can mimesis escape its fate in the ‘‘administered society’’ of late capitalism wherein commodity fetishism takes on ever greater dimension. an indispensable element in the formation of the racist consciousness. Some of the most egregious uses of science and technology have come at the hands of Fascists. is. if not Fascism.’’ As nature rebels against its repression it is channeled in ever new. this unconscious tendency becomes conscious. as the heat of exchange ‘‘warms’’ the earth? How might Adorno’s development and transformation of Benjamin’s understanding of mimesis stimulate new thought about the problem of the domination of nature.

the unconscious product of the animal organ in the struggle for existence. self-awareness and the conscience. But in human society. class conﬂict. is .22 One challenge for a critical theory mindful of its past is to incorporate post-Freudian psychoanalytics.150
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fully develop a new science that produces useful knowledge and an alternative mode of representation and conceptualization with the capacity for emancipatory political agency without implication in domination? Does a new or old mimesis offer access to an alternative to the various forms of ‘‘identity thinking’’ manifested as racism. Further consideration is necessary to understand the controlled projection. including its feminist critiques and per-
. in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and other early works. the latter requires an increasingly ﬁrm control over projection. of automatic projection. a distinction is made between without and within. the possibility of distancing and identifying.
Mimesis and Psychology
Freudian psychoanalysis was a major inﬂuence on the early Frankfurt critical theorists and is clearly present. the ﬁxed universal order of which science is merely an abstract expression. and the way in which it is deformed into false projection—which is part of the essence of anti-Semitism. . In addition to addressing the potential to transform thought through mimetic representation. he must learn at one and the same time to reﬁne and inhibit it. psychoanalysis. and therefore. sexism. along with the critique of capitalism. where affective and intellectual life are differentiated with the formation of the individual. By learning to distinguish between his own and extraneous thoughts and feelings under the force of economic necessity. and ecological destruction? Some answers may be found in the themes of Adorno’s critical theory where it intersects in reﬂections on science. any examination of the potentials of Adorno’s critical thought should reﬂect on the implications of the inﬂuence of psychoanalysis. Horkheimer and Adorno repeatedly emphasized the contradictory potentials of mimetic identiﬁcation: The system of things. and possible visions of a future free of domination. .

’’24 It is in the relation between ‘‘empirical’’ data and mimesis that a fundamental problem may exist. it is important to note a problem in recent attempts to develop a ‘‘post-Freudian’’ and ‘‘post-Lacanian’’ theory of psychoanalysis. This observation about the effects of psychic organization reverses the usual understanding that asserts that organismic development precedes the psychological.)25 Lacan mentions that the female pigeon must see another member of its species at the appropriate time as ‘‘a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon. Lacan’s understanding of the mirror stage is indebted to an article on mimicry and psychology written by Roger Caillois. an image that is ‘‘ﬁctional’’ but that will have enduring effects on the subsequent ‘‘social determination’’ of the agency of the ego. ‘‘The attempt to trace back psychological tendencies to real somatic factual ﬁndings rather than to the conscious life of the autonomous individual.Mimetic Moments
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spectives. and therefore a problem in developing alternative theories and practices of women’s subjectivity or consciousness. An important reason for the turn to Lacanian psychoanalysis by many feminists and deconstructionists has been Lacan’s development of an understanding of subjectivity that addresses problems he saw with Freud’s notion of the Ego.’’26 The same effect may be
. Other commentators have described the mirror stage as Lacan’s only piece of ‘empirical’ data. an organization that occurs even before the child has the ability to use language. This ‘‘primordial form’’ of the I is based on the image (or imago) the infant forms of itself. offers a truly materialistic aspect. This problem occurs at the intersection of mimesis and psychoanalysis.’’ One important interpreter of Lacan has even observed. In Lacan’s ‘‘Mirror Stage’’ article he develops his idea of the organization of an I by the infant. speciﬁcally female pigeons and migratory locusts. ‘‘Some critics have called the concept of the mirror stage Lacan’s myth (just as the instinct was Freud’s.23 Lacan developed the idea of the ‘‘mirror stage’’ (or mirror phase) of development to help explain the formation of the Ego or the ‘‘I. Before we move to feminist encounters with psychoanalysis and mimesis. or the collective unconscious was Carl Jung’s). As Elizabeth Grosz has demonstrated. Lacan’s claim that this prelinguistic self-image has determinate effects on the human organism is supported by reference to effects of visual identiﬁcation in other species.’’ The connections between these observations and Benjamin’s writing have been explored by Jeneen Hobby. (Adorno reviewed the Caillois essay and concluded.

but with an emphasis on the psychological rather than the Darwinian. in as much as they raise the problem of the signiﬁcation of space for the living organism—psychological concepts hardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on these matters than ridiculous attempts to reduce them to the supposedly supreme law of adaptation.’’27 When this observation is broadened further to include identiﬁcations in a larger ﬁeld. of all of space and its occupants. it raises other issues and questions circulating around the ideas of self and other: ‘‘But the facts of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as cases of heteromorphic identiﬁcation. Caillois’s exploration of the relationship of mimicry and spatiality was a ‘‘powerful inﬂuence on Lacan’s notions of the mirror stage. he notes. The analysis results from what he claims mimesis reveals about the relationship of an organism to the space it occupies: ‘‘Mimesis is particularly signiﬁcant in outlining the ways in which the relations between an organism and its environment are blurred and confused—the way in which its environment is not distinct from the organism but is an active internal component of its identity. the order of the imaginary. hiding it from its predators. Caillois considers mimicry a ‘‘luxury’’ or excess over natural sur-
. is bound up in this mimetic process.’’29 In the original essay. As Grosz interprets it. Grosz’s further observations uncritically follow Lacan’s subsequent citation of Caillois on mimicry and psychology. Mimicry has no value in the dark. it is the additional statements by Caillois that are problematic and that Grosz does not challenge. As Grosz explains: Caillois claims that mimicry does not serve any adaptive function.152
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induced.’’28 Lacan seems to be saying that the whole representation of the not-I. Lacan generalizes from this empirical observation to make larger claims for the phenomenon: ‘‘Such facts are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identiﬁcation that would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic. speciﬁcally the way they ‘‘mimic’’ other insects and their natural environment. by simply placing the pigeon before a mirror. for most predators rely on the sense of smell rather than of vision. Caillois examined the behavior of insects.’’ However. and psychosis. This exploration of mimesis then provided a model or ‘‘analogue’’ for the understanding of forms of psychosis. Mimicry does not have survival value. Its purpose is not to ensure the survival of the species through disguising the insect.

So it should come as no surprise that such insects sometimes have other and more effective ways to protect themselves. He abandons naturalistic explanations to seek some kind of answer in psychology. the conclusions derived from these empirical observations are illogical and are better explained by more current ecological understandings of mimesis and its relation to evolution.’ ’’31 However. The passage from the article on mimicry and psychosis provides empirical observations as evidence for its conclusions. one ﬁnds many remains of mimetic insects in the stomachs of predators. which mimic distasteful monarch butterﬂies. including other species.30 Grosz cites in a footnote the basis for Caillois’s determination that mimesis has no adaptive value. Mimicry is a consequence not of space but of the representation of and captivation by space. A distasteful or poisonous model is mimicked by a species that a predator would otherwise ﬁnd edible and therefore seek out. are also mimetic. It also helps explain why mimics frequently mimic several model species. and so on. the model is disadvantaged because the predators’ encounters with the edible and harmless mimics increases the time required for the predator to learn of the model’s potential harmfulness. some species that are inedible and would thus have nothing to fear.Mimetic Moments
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vival. if mimics outnumber models at a speciﬁc time. One form of mimesis is Batesian mimicry. inexplicable in terms of self-protection or species survival. involving the false warning coloration of a species. Examples include viceroy butterﬂies. It therefore seems that one ought to conclude with Cunot that this is an ‘epiphenomenon’ whose ‘defensive utility appears to be null. Caillois is quoted directly: ‘‘Generally speaking. There are a variety of ways to understand mimesis and its role in adaptation for both individual and species survival. And conversely. however. indeed. that the ability to camouﬂage itself does not further the survival of the individual and the species.
. thus resulting in the consumption of the lessthan-desirable model. The mimic gains advantage as the predator learns to avoid the distasteful or poisonous model. which works to its advantage against predators. The mimesis characteristic of certain species of insects has to do with distinctions it establishes between itself and its environment. This explains why the mimics are usually less numerous than the inedible model. The learning time for predators depends largely on the ratio of mimics to models. predators may not learn to avoid the models. clearwing moth mimics of bees and wasps.

bull snakes’ mimicry of the rattler. the focus by Caillois on the visual as the site of mimesis fails to adequately account for other mimetic adaptations such as the calls of birds and other auditory imitative behavior. although important. the order of the imaginary and in psychosis. for Lacanian psychoanalysts and those who develop a metapsychology from his observations is how this changes the status of mimesis and identiﬁcation in ‘‘the mirror stage. Contrary to its being an epiphenomenon with a ‘‘null defensive utility. The ﬁrst consists
.33 The relationship between psychoanalysis and identity as conceptualized by Lacan and others is challenged when the basis for the assertions is traced to their ecological roots. one that recognizes its ‘‘natural’’ adaptive function.’’ which occurs when two species that are both distasteful or dangerous mimic each other. However.’’ How does an alternative understanding of mimesis. then. including ‘‘Mullerian mimicry. The concept of mimesis as used in ecological science. such as happens with bees and wasps. for example. but two general perspectives stand out. Predators will encounter both species more frequently than they would one species alone. aspect of mimesis in evolutionary adaptation. this shift also places us back on the terrain of concerns of the early critical theorists about the possibilities of both regressive-repressive mimesis and its emancipatory counterpart. it should be noted. therefore reducing the learning time necessary for the predator to avoid harm. and implicitly consistent with an ecofeminist reliance on the importance of understanding ecosystems in both their human and nonhuman aspects. affect the possibilities of new subjectivities and a new relationship to nature? Additionally. Vision and image are only one.
Feminist Mimesis
The use of mimesis by women for the development of feminist theory has varied greatly. and it also brings us back to feminist uses of mimesis. which both have characteristic black-and-yellow banding.32 The presence of mimetic insects in the stomachs of predators is not scientiﬁc proof or even a reasonable argument against the adaptive function of mimesis. shifts the meaning of key psychoanalytic concepts from those centered on idealistic issues of representation to those of material conceptions of adaptation.154
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There are other types of adaptive mimicry.’’ mimesis has a very broad explanatory power in species evolution. The question.

The necessity for the mimetic strategy can be seen as a consequence of the Lacanian understanding of the place of the subject in language and the resulting impossibility for ‘‘woman’’ to speak at all. or anthropological understandings of the term. philosophy’s ‘‘coherence’’ depends on that which it excludes.Mimetic Moments
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of those who retain the largely aesthetic understanding of mimesis. Irigaray attempts to further interrogate this abyssal center of philosophy. Resembling Adorno. Irigaray’s project does not end with the recognition of the functioning of ‘‘the feminine’’. Julia Kristeva achieves signiﬁcant insights into the workings of language and the possibility of the ‘‘speaking subject’’ by examining ‘‘mimesis and the poetic language inseparable from it. who combines the aesthetic with the material. The excluded other is found to have the uncanny function of serving as the pivot or hinge of philosophy.’’ as the mark of the possibility of masculine or phallic philosophy. For example. Irigaray takes this practice of following the trail of the marginalized and excluded further than Derrida by refusing to halt at the recognition of the aporetic gaps in philosophical and literary texts. for our present needs we can focus on her understanding of mimesis in relation to the possibility of female subjectivity and do this through the elaborations of her writings by both sympathetic and critical commentators. and spoken about. marginalizing. political.
. Irigaray’s project is to help make it possible for women to speak for themselves as themselves. spoken for. Central to the conceptual apparatus Irigaray uses and opposes is Lacanian psychoanalytics. Even when the category remains largely aesthetic. or ‘‘othering’’ characteristic of patriarchal and dominating society. and philosophical history women have been silenced. that is. refusing to accept the silences and exclusions as a functioning of ‘‘the feminine. it still has considerable critical power to reveal the usually hidden or unconscious processes of exclusion. Instead of making this a too simple summary of her concerns. seeking to liberate the excluded other from its servitude. aiming to ‘‘effect a shift in the position of the subject of enunciation. the second goes beyond this to link the body or materiality to mimetic behavior and therefore comes closer to the strategy of Adorno. Irigaray is notorious for the difﬁculty involved in unpacking her language and style. when throughout social.’’35 In other words. Irigaray (like Derrida) interrogates the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history to show what has been excluded or marginalized.’’34 Luce Irigaray has followed a ‘‘strategy of mimesis’’ to challenge the current order. natural.

In the analyses that rely on the structural linguistics that inﬂuenced understanding of Lacanian psychoanalytics. The strategy of mimetic repetition is rooted in the psychoanalytic understanding of how to treat the disturbance of a patient or analysand that has resulted in the inability of the individual to fully experience what life has to offer. This process is fundamentally dependent on the child’s relationship to its parents.’’ cultural identity. For Irigaray. female subjects. Irigaray suggests that this has led to the apotheosis of rationality—modern technology—and to apparently unstoppable processes of destruction. ‘‘woman’’ has been found to serve as the condition of possibility of language itself. the female subject. She recognizes that subjects are formed in a complex system of ‘‘structuring effects’’ through ‘‘variables’’ such as ‘‘sexual morphology. as for most feminists. then. Simple opposition
. and so on. the process of relieving the patient from the burden expressed by dysfunctional symptoms is centered around allowing the repressed contents of the unconscious to resurface to the level of language. and especially society under capitalism and continuing patriarchy. it can be said that under existing sociohistorical conditions the process of identity formation for the male child involves the exclusion and separation of the mother from the child’s ‘‘imagined’’ or fantasized identity. yet cannot itself be truly represented. which occurs with the development of the individual male Ego. then. However. Without going into the details of the psychoanalytic account of the process. the mimetic strategy involves occupying the masculine position in order to disrupt its claims and open a space for what is supposedly unrepresentable. Feminist analyses of Western civilization. age. thus making a space for possible other. For the analyst. the current symbolic order is based on the male’s acquisition of language.156
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of ‘‘woman’’. and of women in philosophy. for Irigaray. It is an attempt to raise a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves—yet. sexuality has a privileged place in the history of these structuring effects. religion. In the story of psychoanalysis. have shown how women have been systematically denied a voice in their own self-becoming. then. and politics. literature.36 The strategy of mimesis. but attempts to establish the possibilities for a truly female subject who can speak for herself. involves occupying the male position in order to disrupt it. Freud’s ‘‘talking cure’’ is an attempt to raise to consciousness what has been repressed in the unconscious but that still manifests itself in a symptomology that makes it impossible for the patient to adequately function.

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would merely amount to women’s returning to their place in the male order of exclusion. mimesis also serves an ‘‘ecological’’ function: ‘‘We might note also that of the terms Irigaray uses: mimesis. that women also need to protect themselves against (re)assimilation and destruction by the masculine economy. comes from the domain of animal ethology and means ‘camouﬂage’ or ‘protective colouring. displacing the displacement. using mimesis to disrupt the prevailing order and to make a space for an alternative representation from which women are not excluded: ‘‘To play with mimesis is thus. This is not simply a version of ecofeminism (though it is that too). The symbolic distribution is hierarchical. Mimetic representation will be repeated. mimetisme. and the allocation of the ‘lower functions’ to women. usually translated mimeticism. I think.’’38 Irigaray’s strategy.’’39 In miming the philosophers and psychoanalysts. ‘‘Insofar as the Platonic account of the origin is itself a displacement of a maternal origin. Whitford believes that Irigaray understands the feminine as receptacle for the natural world. is to inhabit the language of the philosopher in order to reveal what remains as the condition of its own possibility even as it is excluded from representation.’’41 Irigaray is playing with representation. The point is to show how what is excluded as unrepresentable is already within the system of representation. mimetisme. then.’’40 The system of representation is shown to be an effect of power. including Plato and Lacan. reproduced. showing that origin to be an ‘effect’ of a certain ruse of phallogocentric power. Irigaray may be arguing. one of them. Irigaray merely mimes that very act of displacement. for a woman. masque.’ I think this may be relevant too.’’37 Even more clearly. Irigaray both violates the ‘‘prohibition against resemblance’’ and the ‘‘notion of resemblance as copy. The strategy is to mime the passages that operate to exclude the feminine and present woman as an inferior copy. As Margaret Whitford states in her interpretation of Irigaray. etc. on to women. What is being disrespected is those parts of himself that the male imaginary has split off and projected—into the world. copied until ‘‘this emergence of the outside within the system calls into question its systematic closure and its pretension to be self-grounding.. To simply proclaim a female rationality incommensurable to male rationality would be to reenact the dominant symbolic order based on the process of exclusion. to try to recover the place of
. the male psyche’s attempt to distance itself from nature: ‘‘It is signiﬁcant that Irigaray stresses that nature (the natural world) is not respected. but part of her argument about the symbolic distribution.

are considered diminished in their capacity for reason. . and the masculine the masculine. along with feminist challenges to the dominant ideology of science. or if what is merely material begins to signify. they will not be the same as each other. to the point where the status of the terms feminine and masculine begins to destabilize.43 Butler wonders if Irigaray’s strategy. if there is an occupation and reversal of the master’s discourse.’ by an effect of playful repetition. strategies of mimetic representation may have ‘‘survival’’ value. and animals.’’42 However. where slaves are characterized as those who do not speak his language. At the very least. Judith Butler is not satisﬁed with the strategy. it will come from many quarters. and those resignifying practices will converge in ways that scramble the self-replicating presumptions of reason’s mastery. in not speaking his language. Why should ‘‘the feminine’’ be identiﬁed with the space of unrepresentability? Butler insistently recalls the consequences of Plato’s exclusions that go beyond the feminine: Plato’s scenography of intelligibility depends on the exclusion of women.158
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her exploitation by discourse. This xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialized Others. so as to make ‘visible.
. and who. what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. but also the feminine the feminine. the scenography of reason is rocked by the crisis on which it was always built. ‘‘To the extent that a set of reverse mimes emerge from those quarters. The destabilization of reason’s claim to represent itself would then come from a variety of directions. might present the possibility of not only the feminine ‘‘penetrating’’ the masculine order of representation. encouraging the process of creation of new subjectivities and of a newly mimetic world. without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it . for it seems in its miming to reenact the logic of identity it seeks to challenge. come together to address the concerns and claims of ecofeminism. and those whose ‘‘natures’’ are considered less rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of laboring to reproduce the conditions of private life. . slaves. which tends to keep in place a heterosexual economy.’’44 These observations by Irigaray and other ‘‘feminist’’ theorists of representation and female subjectivity. children. For if the copies speak.

This would be perfectly in keeping with Adorno’s temperament and his belief that ‘‘[t]ruth is objective. to generate a variety of analyses revealing the depth and breadth of the domination of women under social systems controlled by and for the beneﬁt of men.’’47
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Mimetic Possibilities
The strength of feminism has been its ability. and to the question of how the images. for he considered it a validation of their correctness. is the ‘‘impossible image’’ of the new world of the future to be formed in the present. This is not an attempt to claim that the concerns or the concepts and terms used are the same. concepts. Nothing pleased Adorno more than when a friend came to similar insights independently. that there is a shared identity between them. Central to this desired change. and provide the energy to motivate other individuals and new generations to continue hoping and struggling for a changed world. to the unconscious imaginings of both men and women. Further. then. a world where suffering recedes and the ideas of freedom and happiness can truly fulﬁll themselves in concrete reality? In asking these questions one might seem to have already surrendered to an optimism contradicting so many representations of critical theory as the ‘‘melancholy science.’’45 Or the question might be raised that this talk of freedom and happiness is itself a collapse into the discredited rhetoric of ‘‘the modern. ‘‘The uniquely individual experiences of critical subjectivity ran parallel because they focused on particulars which reﬂected the same objective reality. but it does seem correct to claim that the similarities are not fortuitous but result instead from the fact that they are related through the objects of their studies. what I want to examine here is the similarity between Adorno’s concerns and many of those voiced by feminism and ecofeminism. and practices of society can be changed.’’46 As Susan Buck-Morss has indicated. women with feminist commitments have been able to show that an adequate answer to the problem of domination does not consist in a ‘‘liberal’’ solution of equal inclusion in the existing system. The problem goes to the very structure of language and beyond.’’ These questions aside. based on its recognition of the unfreedom and suffering of actual women in their day-to-day lives. to how we become gendered subjects capable of speech. not plausible. open the unconscious. What image(s) will spark the imaginations. and it followed that collaboration was possible among intellectuals even when they worked alone.

As earlier indicated.’’48 Mimesis ‘‘survives’’ in aesthetic behavior. which is deﬁned by its openness. This process shapes both the relation of the individual to art and the historical macrocosm. and its increasing penetration by the social division of labor.49 Intolerance for openness to otherness or the nonidentical is a manifestation of ‘‘reiﬁed consciousness. or music. painting. however. As Jameson argues. indeed. including the relationship of aesthetics to the domination of nature. Ratio devoid of mimesis negates itself. Adorno’s writing moves between ﬁgures of private property and personal identity: The ﬁgures of the tendential restriction of the individual subject. the ˆ raison d’etre of raison.160
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Adorno’s understanding of mimesis helps illuminate an understanding of aesthetic phenomenon. especially from 1945 to the 1960s. are qualitative and the mimetic faculty is a qualitative faculty. subjectivity.’’ is the death of reason more broadly understood: Thinking begins to turn around in circles when it shrinks back from the task of sublimating mimetic behaviour. a process also in which mimesis itself survives through adaptation. the world has become quite intolerant of spirit. in poetry. raising the question of the possibility of recuperation of the mimetic impulse. is historically necessary: as the world objectively loses its openness. and new possibilities (the not-yet). and the forms a recovered mimesis might take in a world freed of domination. The deadly dichotomization of emotion and thought is a historical result that can be undone. the triumph of one transformation of mimesis.50 Capitalism as it consolidated itself. and contrary to so many cursory readings that are now prevalent. ‘‘instrumental rationality. It is a process set in motion by mimesis. but it is not unchanged. Adorno does not collapse mimesis into aesthetics: ‘‘Aesthetic behaviour is neither mimesis pure and simple nor the repression of mimesis. Negatively. re-
. was also gaining increased control over subjectivity.’’ Fredric Jameson has helpfully located within negative dialectics the place of the critique of capitalism that Adorno borrows from Marx and shown that it is intimately connected to a certain understanding of the psychology of the individual and to the ﬁgure of mimesis. it should be added. it tends to have less and less need for spirit.) This self-negation of reason. (Ends. for example. mimesis often seems to be equated with aesthetic behavior.

however. for ratio itself becomes mimetic through the thrill of the new. to the free subjectivity whose role is ever more diminished. but which has become a reason turned against itself. Now human creativity shrinks to machine-minding and reason to a ﬁtful organic impulse. should not be viewed as identical to the crude or orthodox Marxist understanding of ‘‘alienated objectiﬁcation of subjectivity’’ exempliﬁed in the factory setting alone. How can mimesis resist the logic of identity. an increasingly higher percentage of mental machinery and instrumental operations as opposed to living human labor. it is only through the new that mimesis can be so ﬁrmly wedded to rationality that it will not regress. The ever recurring image of the advertiser is the appearance of the new product. The new in art is the aesthetic counterpart to the expanding reproduction of capital in society. mimesis must become an ally of the new: ‘‘Now. . in that reiﬁcation is also to be understood throughout Adorno’s writings as ‘‘the suppression of heterogeneity in the name of identity. not the new itself. although it is that too. . and Adorno can speak of an ‘‘organic composition of capital’’ within the psychic subject: that is to say.’’52 Mimesis provides an avenue of resistance to reiﬁcation. Of course nothing would ever be so simple for Adorno as to say that the realization of the new would be Utopia. art offers an alternative reality. Being a
. resistance to the near-total suppression of otherness. again. As Martin Jay makes clear. Adorno’s understanding of reiﬁcation owes as much to Nietzsche as Marx. Both hold out the promise of undiminished plenitude’’ (31). novelty is that characteristic of consumer goods through which they are supposed to set themselves off from the self-same aggregate supply. Art has appropriated this economic category.’’53 Of course ‘‘the new’’ has also become an integral part of capitalism. reduced to mere means. the collapse of the unique characteristics of the particular or the individual into a positivistically manipulable variable? As Adorno explains. stimulating consumer decisions subject to the needs of capital. .Mimetic Moments
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join the language of Capital itself. ‘‘In its original economic setting. which still assumes the name of reason. for ‘‘[t]he new is the longing for the new.’’ with its increasing reliance on fashion—change of style. especially ‘‘late capitalism. This is the curse of everything new.51 Reiﬁcation for Adorno. which in its fantastic representation quenches the ideal consumer’s never ending thirst for more. Capitalism portrays the answer to the end of suffering as the latest consumer item.

Art enables its ‘‘consumer’’ to experience the uniqueness otherwise repressed in existing situations of domination. modiﬁed mimesis has to bear some of the blame for art’s afﬁrmative essence because it mitigates pain.162
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negative of the old. in Adorno’s theory of aesthetics. It is the basis for the critical subjectivity made possible by ‘‘authentic’’ art. In the same way. is at the core of art’s mission. of spirit. as it were. seems to be saying ‘I am a rhino’ ’’ (164). then.’ asserting a selfhood which is not carved out of the interdependent totality of being by identifying thought but stands on its own. their similarity to language seems to say something like ‘this is me’ or ‘here I come. as Adorno presents it. say a rhinoceros. is the time after suffering to be represented? Here is the problem of representing the unrepresentable again. mimesis has an ambivalent relationship within art (as it does in science. not the unrepresentable before the (male) subject. making it controllable within a spiritual totality without really changing it. but freedom through mimesis. but it also participates in that adaptive function imposed by society’s domination of the individual. art remains within the sphere of ‘‘universal alienation.’’ What is being imitated in the artwork is the process that brings into being the unique and therefore inimitable. On the other hand. How. the new is subservient to the old while considering itself to be Utopian’’ (47). perhaps spirit even occurs in the original form of mimesis itself.’’ but it is at least partially less alienated to the extent that ‘‘in art
. In addition. This modiﬁcation of mimesis is the constitutive act of spiritualization in art. Adorno attempts to explain the freeing of the substance of the artist (which is not the same as subjective expression as usually understood in aesthetic philosophy) in the artwork: ‘‘As for those vases. prior to any reﬂection upon spirit which develops spiritualization further. a speechless animal. What light is shed by mimesis on the problem of the unrepresentability of the Utopian future? The utopia of undiminished plenitude is the image art offers against the repetition of the same and suffering within the logic of identity and the domination of nature. This declaration on the part of the artwork (like that of the individual animal) is an assertion of its uniqueness and of its participation in ‘‘spirit. but this is an unrepresentable future. then. (165) For Adorno. Spirit is already posited in this modiﬁed mimesis by the work. and in philosophy). which would make mimesis the physiological progenitor.

and also natural history. then. passages on mimesis in Aesthetic Theory and elsewhere reveal a consistent concern with mimesis as a primordial inﬂuence on. philosophy. When combined with the discussion of mimesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment. however. Examples of this moment can be found in areas of life that resist assimilation into the logic of identity and domination. Expression in art. expression reﬂects not only the subject’s hubris but also its just complaint about the failure of subjectivity. In its metamorphoses. (175) What can be taken from these observations by Adorno and feminists who are trying to ﬁnd alternatives to the present order of dominating subjectivity? First. Likeness to animals. instances which spell happiness for the individual. although it does not indicate that art can be reduced to a form of play. and elsewhere. in various directions. Mimesis has evolved through human history. non-violent way. it retains a moment that challenges the overwhelmingly repressive uses to which it has been put. Seen from this point of view. There are instances of a sudden rediscovery of that likeness. economic conditions aims at creating a true subject which has been stymied so far. art. The language of little children and of animals seems to be the same. however. The moment of joy in art has a certain playfulness to it that. from magic to science. This cipher or hieroglyph of subjectivity is an image of a future possibility in which suffering is absent and pleasure and happiness reign. is part of the attempt to create a new subjectivity. along with a third attraction: that to animals. if not foundation for. alienation. Both kinds of attraction are rooted out by the world of adults. or suffering. mimesis plays a fundamental role in the emergence of subjectivity.Mimetic Moments
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everything passes through spirit’’ so that it is ‘‘humanized in a non-repressive. is a human characteristic which is never entirely repressed by consciousness. subjectivity. implies for Adorno that freedom from repression will have certain childlike and ‘‘clownish’’ aspects: The attraction clowns have for children is the same as the attraction art has for them. Adorno focused on art and critical philosophy as two of these areas in
. expression being the cipher for the possibility of that subjectivity’’ (171). ‘‘The emancipation of society from the predominance of material.’’ Art is forced to use the means of domination of nature to some extent in order to express the possibility of an alternative existence without domination.

Second reﬂection serves to remind us of this. the beautiful in nature does not then become the principle of aesthetics. Although a moment in the process of self-reﬂection.61 For Adorno the ‘‘essence of natural beauty’’ is the ‘‘anamnesis’’ of ‘‘something that is more than just for-other’’ (110). art may provide a glimpse of a possibility that also appears in the beautiful in nature. is it possible to elucidate the more politically speciﬁc ramiﬁcations of ‘‘mimetic subjectivity’’ for (eco)feminism and democratic politics? Adorno’s discussion of natural beauty and its historical relation to the domination of nature contributes to an understanding of the alternative to domination. It is a glimpse of the possibility of being more than just for-other. to a world become means. . retains the hope of an alternative future. If there is hope of a better future. It does not mean that critical reﬂection on art and its relationship to the beautiful in nature involves some ‘‘pointing’’ to a metaphysical transcendence of material life. Rather.62 What natural beauty suggests is an independent moment of nature irreducible to an object for human use or conceptual captivation. to art and the critical evaluation of art. ‘‘The beautiful in nature is different from both the notion of a ruling principle and the denial of any principle whatsoever. . he always emphasized the negative aspects of mimesis. while focusing on the continuous extension of domination. The vanishing point of this development is the insight—incorporated as a partial aspect in modern art—that the beauty of nature cannot be copied’’ (98–99). Beauty in nature becomes a point for ‘‘second reﬂection’’ about the direction of reason. Adorno’s turn to aesthetics. its uses in a society of increasing domination and repression.164
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mutual need of each other. This is where the function
. [M]ankind becomes aware through art of what rationality has erased from memory. namely spirit. one freed of unnecessary suffering and open to the possibility of true happiness. Art provides an image that is denied in a society reduced to instrumental rationality. however. Every act of making in art is an endless endeavour to articulate what is not makeable. . ‘‘The restitution of nature hinges on the emergence of something that has escaped the fatefulness of nature. It is like a state of reconciliation’’ (110). Critical philosophy and art formed the basis of Adorno’s understanding of negative dialectics that. is an attempt to articulate a critical philosophy that puts into concepts the process by which works of art attempt to speak of an alternative world.

from reiﬁcation. This corresponds to the plurality of things in general: they too defy identiﬁcation. This other is not some unifying concept but a manifold. . They survive because they bring death. not in any form that can be simply copied. Illusion in art is the attempt to escape from this principle’’ (193). . To the degree to which art pines after an image of nature. Art becomes conscious of it in a non-identical other (which instrumental. which is the principle of death. Nature does not yet exist. Works of art succeed to the extent that they betray mimesis. Artworks are indicators of possibility. and the future ‘‘utopia?’’ Adorno argues against any aesthetics that attempts to assert that art should function to represent the world as it is. just as works of art destroy as they create. This is particularly true of modern art. Spirit tones down its antagonistic essence and becomes conciliatory. tearing it away from its context of immediacy and real life. ‘‘They kill what they objectify. . The mimetic moment in the new constellation of elements is not an act of simply copying or mirroring reality but results in a displacement of current relationships. identity-positing reason reduces to a material and which is called nature). at least not in its dominant forms. However.
. but not simple reproductions of existing relationships. a nature made possible through the mediation of subjectivity. The ‘‘escape’’ from the principle of death. a thing. the reduction of the other into yet another example. where we notice a general mimetic abandonment to reiﬁcation. This differs from what classicism meant by reconciliation. Artworks are constellations of existing elements. for truth content in art is a manifold and not an abstract or generic concept. (191) But then how does art function to provide images for imitation? What is the process of mimesis released in this understanding of aesthetics? What is the relationship between mimetic acts in the present. of life and death. The transformation of subjectivity will involve a complex relationship of creation and destruction.Mimetic Moments
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of art as a restorer of historically repressed nature becomes important. of the not-yet. this subjectivity is also not of the present. This is what is meant when Adorno speaks of the possibility of reconciliation. that reduction of life into a mere object. depends on some possibility of humans’ acting otherwise. Art illuminates the possibility of a nature that does not yet exist and has never existed. it represents the truth of non-being.

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Reconciliation here refers to the mode of conduct of works of art in so far as they become conscious of the non-identical in their midst.55 Those who attempt to recover a prior or ‘‘pre-historic’’ subjectivity often turn to cultural anthropology for empirical and philosophic support. The utopia anticipated by artistic form is the idea that things at long last ought to come into their own. while attempting to include the concept of gender in their analyses. relationships.
Ecofeminism
Ecofeminists do not have a common uniﬁed position or methodology. One of the most problematic developments in this area is that of ‘‘spiritual ecofeminism.54 The examination of the concept of ‘‘the feminine’’ by feminists and ecofeminists has revealed the historical association of women with nature. In this ver-
. . the mere continuation of instrumental rationality and reiﬁcation behind a new mask. and the historical devaluation of women’s subjectivity with respect to male subjectivity. included goddess worship. for ecofeminism. . This ecofeminism hypothesizes a prepatriarchal culture that honored women. By following the dynamic of self-sameness to the end. Ecofeminism frequently details the lives of women and their relationship to nonhuman nature to reveal how both are systematically dominated and repressed. or even a common analysis of the ecology crisis. or at least matrilineal. (194–95) The question for feminism and radical ecology. This is the stage of development mimesis has reached today. art works assimilate themselves to the non-identical. One ‘‘goal’’ of feminism has become the redeﬁnition or resymbolization of the relation of women’s experience to the concept of subjectivity. and was organized through matriarchal. . but they do tend to make use of the central radical ecological categories of nature and subjectivity. is whether the alternative knowledge and ethics that they offer can serve as models of a mode of behavior that is mimetic without reverting or regressing to mere repetition of the existing system of domination.’’ which has failed to address the problems of hierarchy that result from political interpretation by a single ‘‘spiritual’’ authority.

or freedom?57 One interpretation of critical or ‘‘negative’’ thought asserts that participation in politics in the present liberal. Much of recent feminism’s concerns with subjectivity and identity revolves around the status of ‘‘the feminine’’ and its critical potential for restructuring symbolic and political orders. Efforts in this area. political authority is derived from spiritual authority. and may help to address the shortcomings of ‘‘spiritual’’ and ‘‘rationalist’’ versions of ecofeminism. while challenging the entire framework of philosophy and political thought.Mimetic Moments
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sion of ecofeminism. Instead of representing feminine sensitivity and spirituality it reproduces the typical structures of power. Those who oppose the atomistic individualism typical of liberal politics contend
. only in ecofeminist disguise. ecofeminism’s ecological and political practices tend to be guided by Enlightenment or rationalist impulses. parliamentary framework only serves to strengthen the bindings of oppression and domination. Unfortunately. This produces a fundamentally hierarchical and antidemocratic politics. Does the negativity of the critique preclude political action other than that based on mystical or metaphysical notions of peace. these approaches to feminism and ecofeminism. including those of Irigaray. reconciliation. ‘‘Rationalist’’ ecofeminism attempts to provide enlightened guidance of social development. This understanding of the relationship of politics to spirituality collapses the political back into the spiritual or religious. which insists that women’s reason is equally human reason and therefore entitles women to equal access to all rational democratic institutions and the legitimate exercise of power. rather than those of spirituality or religion being used. This means that radical forms of feminism and ecofeminism are forced to face the same charges Habermas has made against Adorno concerning the relation of philosophy to itself and political practice. have yet to establish other than a negating practice. however.56 However. have attempted to transform the relations of women to society and politics by transforming the categories and concepts of Western philosophy and political thought. when traditional philosophical categories and concepts are retained. reducing the political consciousness of individual subjects and making them subservient to a higher interpretive authority. this form of feminism seems to be largely content with acquiring for women the same powers over the domination of nature that have for so long been uniformly controlled by men. resulting in a premodern rather than a postmodern political agency. thereby very closely paralleling mainstream feminism.

Interpretation of these experiences is further complicated by the frequent occupation by women of multiple categories of oppression and domination. incorporating it into the system of domination. Radical ecological and ecofeminist reliance on ecological science provides empirical information and practical orientation that are lacking in the tradition of critical theory. The problem for ecofeminists. such as Judith Butler. Radical ecological insights additionally force these analyses to recognize that under conditions of unfreedom ‘‘subject positions’’ of individuals or groups are established through a symbolic order in which social identities are at least partially constructed from categories of nature. in their philosophical examinations and political actions. suggesting that other others. or developmental supplement. radical ecologists. to those of early critical theory. attempts to resymbolize ‘‘the feminine’’ and so create new possibilities for women’s subjectivity. as feminism generally has found. It is now widely acknowledged that ‘‘women’s experience’’ cannot be collapsed into a single descriptive category. Adorno also questioned the dominant conceptual process and its relationship to subjectivity. but can only be adequately approached through the recognition of the uniqueness of individuals’ experiences in speciﬁc situations. Ecological insight is an historical and empirical corrective. efforts at (re)constructing identities have also had unexpected consequences. including nonhuman others. using her strategy of mimesis. while avoiding philosophical or political ‘‘nominalism’’ by including social and historical context in the analysis. Others. have questioned why women should solely occupy the space of the ‘‘other’’ in this analysis. Mimesis may be of crucial importance in the development
. and feminists generally is to ﬁnd the links both theoretically and practically that can tie politics to the insights generated in relation to mimesis. Luce Irigaray. As was indicated earlier.168
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that political practice should instead be conceived as an attempt to construct alternative subjectivities and identities. However.’’ In efforts echoing those of the critical theorists. and thus extending instrumental rationality to the point of its culmination in a ‘‘false totality. to challenge imposed identities. including the conceptual operations by which the nonidentical is reduced to the identical. dominated nature. when attempts to analyze women’s experiences begin to include other categories such as race and class. creating multiple strategies of mimesis that might disrupt the current system of domination. must also be resymbolized. feminists and ecofeminists have attempted.

not to be understood as a mere copying of the given. of course. ‘‘Its horror lies in the fact that the lie is obvious but persists. The ecological subject’s attitude toward the other is a willingness to let it be and become. The holocaust against other species continues essentially unabated. However.Mimetic Moments
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of an adequate philosophical and practical approach to the problems of ecological destruction and catastrophe. The future ecological society assists the development of the other. accomplished through the translation of existing elements into an image of the desired future. and the ﬂowering of otherness. Development of a nondestructive mode of ecological interaction with nature can only be fully achieved by human beings who are capable of individually interpreting their everyday life activities from the perspective of ecological subjects and then representing that experience in a radically democratic manner. Changed consciousness in part of or even most of the population.’’58 Even in the most ‘‘enlightened’’ age. but as its metamorphosis. This will
. including an increase in the awareness of the world about the impact of systems of domination on the lives of women. and in a brief enough time period. there remains the potential for mimetic regression. and about the destruction of nature. occurring through its own impulses.’’ This is an image of a future possibility. and foreseeable global ecological disruptions could result in a rapid destruction of human populations to such an extent. the imagining of a reconciled future took the form of an ‘‘exact fantasy. The ecological subject will not be an absolute subject. one in which the ‘‘reconciliation’’ of humans with nature will have taken place. This exact fantasy is accomplished through a mimetic transformation. For Adorno. it is still unclear whether these changes in consciousness will be long-lasting enough and deep enough to prevent future catastrophes of a wholly new scale. an anticipation of the development of possibilities and potentials existing latently in the present damaged life. It will not attempt to reduce the other to its own concepts. in its own time. that it would dwarf the destruction of human populations of any previous historical epochs. or to the needs of a production apparatus. an anticipation of the elimination of reiﬁcation. There have been important developments in cultural and ecological understanding since the feminist and ecology movements’ ‘‘rebirths’’ in the 1960s. does not mean that it actually will be translated into better conditions on the planet. for it recognizes what is nonidentical to itself. As Adorno said in the context of Fascism. The idea of an ecological society is an anticipation of a situation of reconciliation.

‘‘Mapping’’ is read widely today across academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering? —Theodor Adorno.’’ was republished in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. as the writing of history.8
Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
Sora Y. a progressive body of knowledge about race and the law produced mostly by legal academics.1 As one of the articles that heavily inﬂuenced the emergence of the ﬁeld of critical race theory (crt). Crenshaw offers a structural analysis of contemporary
. Aesthetic Theory
´ Kimberle Williams Crenshaw’s momentous ‘‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality. and Violence Against Women of Color. Identity Politics. the ﬁrst major anthology of law review articles gathered under that by now well-known banner. In the article. Han
But then what would art be.

an ‘‘apparition. In the second section we return to the actual text of Crenshaw’s article.’’ We will ﬁnd under the guidance of Adorno’s work in aesthetic theory that the concept is aesthetically ﬁgured in the text. Crenshaw implicitly calls this attitude an ‘‘intersectional sensibility’’—and one we might understand further as a human-looking metaphor. of a ‘‘postintersectionality’’ crt. representational. I discern two levels of literacy enabled by the concept of intersectionality.174
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identity politics and how such politics. Crenshaw argues that Black and other women of color’s experiences of racial and gender oppression have been erased. and that the ﬁguration produces what Adorno has called the experience of the ‘‘shudder.2 Even if postintersectionality purports to develop an analytical framework that is more inclu-
. is the experience of a certain critical attitude. have relegated Black women and other women of color to the margins of racial and gender liberation movements. Attempting to locate Black women and other women of color on the social landscape through a critique of national antiracist and antisexist discourses. In addition.’’ as the illusion that gives rise to the concept of intersectionality. In this chapter I am most concerned with submitting Crenshaw’s article to an ethic of reading guided by certain aesthetic principles put forth by the critical theorist Theodor Adorno. and political scales of social life.’’ ‘‘Women of color. through a reading of Angela Davis’s application of intersectionality in formulating a radical feminist agenda at the 2000 Incite! Women of Color Against Violence Conference. an ethical reading provides us with an opportunity to better understand the concept of ‘‘women of color. This erasure is elaborately mapped according to the intersectional locations of Black women and other women of color at structural. representational. as well as the undesirability. grounded on limited experiences of race and gender. In doing so.’’ The ﬁrst section of this chapter situates the two bodies of knowledge— critical race theory and critical theory—alongside each other for purposes of this ethical reading of intersectionality. in which the ethic of reading is embedded in the formal construction of the concept of intersectionality. The ﬁnal section demonstrates how this ethic of reading is performed outside the parameters of the text. The third section draws out the social signiﬁcance of such a reading of intersectionality through Adorno’s concept of the shudder. The article outlines these multidimensional scales— structural. and political—from which the concept of intersectionality is derived. These sections taken together suggest the impossibility.

beyond which is not more objective social reality subject to rational thought. I return to Crenshaw’s article as the most widely cited work on the concept. the concept of intersectionality has a complex and troubled intellectual history. I suspect that in his position as a public philosopher and cultural critic. the text in which the concept and analysis take form—I refer to Crenshaw’s article as Intersectionality to capture the textuality of the concept. the distinction between each will hopefully become clearer through the discussion offered below.’’ While the debate around this call has generated much discussion in the published literature and the classroom alike. I believe that Adorno may have recognized
. Indeed. I leave it as background. we ﬁnd that the justiﬁcation for intersectionality is its ability to retain a negative moment in the dialectical relation between politics. Further. For where intersectionality brings us to the limit of knowledge. Granting that the exercise of critical thought always involves a gesture of return. to represent what I feel is essential to understanding the theoretical work of intersectionality—that is. on the other. To that end. a question requiring a rereading to ﬁgure out what exactly ‘‘intersectionality’’ is in the ﬁrst instance. I broach the basic question underlying this debate: How does one do this? While I do not attempt to answer this initial question here.3 Such an observation bears repeating at a time when a faction of those working within the ﬁeld of crt are calling for the transcendence of intersectionality. and imagination and desire. on the one hand. toward a more radical transformation of the future. For the moment.4 naming such a movement ‘‘postintersectionality.
Critical (Race) Theory
Within crt there is some amount of confusion about whether intersectionality is an analytical framework or a concept.Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
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sive and egalitarian than is intersectionality. with the additional complexity of how the concept of ‘‘women of color’’ ﬁgures upon this confusion. this actually misses the theoretical work of intersectionality altogether. however. Theodor Adorno would have approved of accepting the text’s invitation for such a rereading. we will grant that intersectionality can be interpreted as both an analytical framework and a concept.

despite all its tendencies to expand. there is a practical afﬁnity between Crenshaw and Adorno that should not be understated. I want to include Adorno as a guide in reading the language of those concepts instantiated by intersectionality as a theoretical text.176
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this project as such an exercise when he observed in his essay ‘‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’’: The theorist who intervenes in practical controversies nowadays discovers on a regular basis and to his shame that whatever ideas he might contribute were expressed long ago—and usually better the ﬁrst time around. Their afﬁnity is based upon the historicity of the social impulses from which their respective ﬁelds of thought garnered their ‘‘critical’’ edge. because the concept of intersectionality is itself an attempt to recover what has been forgotten by critical thought. in law and politics. underlying Adorno’s implicit suggestion that this rereading of Crenshaw is both necessary and appropriate for theory and politics. this means that time-honored arguments must once again be trotted out. and other like-minded bodies of legal theory more generally. While crt organized knowledge against the hegemony of post–civil rights racism. Rather.5 Intersectionality has perhaps been buried under scholarship that has indeed ‘‘grown beyond measure’’ in our time of professionalized academic research. To do this would be to take Adorno literally and miss the value of his work completely. I believe the text itself reﬂects how it is that those engaged in the ﬁeld of crt. I do not mean to use Adorno as an excuse to ‘‘trot out’’ the ‘‘time-honored arguments’’ articulated by Crenshaw through the concept of intersectionality. the concept also suggests how to go about this recovery. in many cases seems to be regressing to earlier stages. Following the form of the concept as it appears in the theoretical text. Additionally. even in its superstructure. should go about the project of critical thought. Critical thought must let itself be guided by the concrete forms of consciousness it opposes and must go over once again what they have forgotten. Embarrassingly enough. My point is to bring out the concept in and of Intersectionality. the Frankfurt School undertook similar
. Not only has the mass of writings and publications grown beyond measure: society itself. Even critical thought risks becoming infected by what it criticizes. In other words. but through the language and metaphorical acts instantiated by the form taken by the concept in the text.

These preliminary avenues of communication between crt and critical theory having been laid out. crt and critical theory clearly are intellectual movements for social justice. no less. the two might be seen in solidarity with each other.’’ Accordingly. . in the social and cultural consolidation of every political identity.7 At the same time. Crenshaw argues that these movements’ legal reforms and discursive productions continue to reproduce the very structures of domination that they resist.6 Indeed. And constituted in part by those writing within. in Intersectionality the attention to the texture of antiracist and feminist discourse illuminates how the correspondence between object (woman or Black) and subject (women and Blacks) represented by those discourses could not actually correspond if a certain mode of critical thought were applied. there is what Gayatri Spivak has described as ‘‘an itinerary of a constantly thwarted desire to make the text explain. race and gender. Spivak poses the deconstructive method by which such an itinerary can be read as a question: ‘‘What is this explanation as it is constituted by and as it effects a desire to conserve the explanation itself . motivating Crenshaw’s concern with the history of these movements is a mighty effort to deconstruct the opposition between margin and center. . Both crt and the Frankfurt School are best characterized by their critical attitudes toward Enlightenment ideals—including the rule of law as a technical system of social norms and philosophy as a universal system of human truths—which have historically gone hand in hand with mass human suffering and domination. This critical analytical framework demonstrated in Intersectionality recognizes that in every discursive production.8 Speciﬁcally. as both organize against the oppressive institutions and structures of an administered society. and. Crenshaw implicitly
. identity and heterogeneity. what follows is the return. ?’’10 For the purposes of Intersectionality.Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
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intellectual work against the emergence of Fascism on the world scene.
Reading Intersectionality
The critical analytical gesture through which the concept of intersectionality takes ﬁgure targets two historically disparate social movements—feminist and antiracist.’’9 Discerning this itinerary requires a ‘‘trick of rereading.

in one sense. Crenshaw would call the frustration imposed on the desire for identity politics ‘‘intersectional sensibility. At the same time that this imposed tension directs a considerable amount of analytical attention to the center in understanding the opposition between identity and heterogeneity. The imposed tension is a privileged process engendered not so much by the pressure of multiply subordinated identities on and outside singularly subordinated identities. in the name of the parts of us that are not made at home. Crenshaw argues that intersectionality makes it ‘‘easier to understand the need for and to summon the courage to challenge groups that are after all. the tension imposed by the exclusion and marginalization of social movements premised on the ideals of egalitarianism and democracy is generated from within. This takes a great deal of energy and arouses intense anxiety.’’13 About the inhabitance of this prohibited margin. but by the proscription of marginality as such. that we might call attention to how the identity of ‘the group’ has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few. Both text and politic contain their margins to the extent that neither could exist as each historically has without such ‘‘marginalia. ‘home’ to us.’’ Crenshaw mines the value of this deconstructive principle by naming this particular critical gesture ‘‘intersectionality. Crenshaw makes two
. The most one could expect is that we will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations.’’12 In other words.’’11 Crenshaw’s engagement with each movements’ discursive effects on the production of identity politics maps a profoundly inward-moving. I want to reiterate the preceding point. what inhabits the prohibited margin of a particular explanation speciﬁes its particular politics. as the text itself anticipates its failed explanation. the politic itself contains the potential for its failed strategies. political. we are able to reread the signiﬁcance of the margin nonetheless.’’ which both ﬁgures and exhibits the incommensurability of conﬂicting identity-based movements. That is.178
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poses an analogous question: What is this politics (antiracist or feminist) as it is constituted by and as it effects a desire to conserve (racial or gender) identity itself? Before I ﬂesh out the precise signiﬁcance of an intersectional sensibility. introspective path. and representational violence against women of color. Spivak reminds us that ‘‘although the prohibition of marginality that is crucial in the production of any explanation is politics as such. Additionally. In the conclusion of her analysis of structural.

from this ﬁrst metaphoric act.Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
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key observations. This destabilization enacts a deconstruction of the ﬁgure ‘‘identity politics. in other words.’’ (My inclusion of Intersectionality in parenthesis becomes clear immediately below).14 The ﬁrst ﬁgure of deconstruction in Intersectionality is ‘‘identity politics’’ and the metaphorical act that instantiates this ﬁgure of deconstruction are the concepts ‘‘antiracism’’ and ‘‘feminism’’ brought together with the unstable meanings of ‘‘social justice’’ and ‘‘internal exclusions and marginalizations.’’ (thus ‘social justice’). In addition. Intersectionality emerges as one of the most important illusions. if feminist discourse prohibits the explanation of violence against women of color.’’ The text in bold in Chart 1 depicts this metaphorical act. posited as a deconstructive analytical framework. is also named Intersectionality. that the primary deconstructive narrative of Intersectionality has less to do with narrating the location or experiences of women of color than with understanding the limitations of identity politics. thereby allowing the reader to specify the particular politics of certain historical political movements. if antiracist discourse prohibits the explanation of violence against women of color. then feminist discourse relies on a racist politics. The phenomena of ‘‘internal exclusion and marginalizations’’ destabilizes the pure correspondence between the concepts ‘‘antiracism’’ and ‘‘feminism’’ and the meaning ‘‘social justice. Earlier I referred to an ‘‘intersectional sensibility’’ as that which poses a frustration of the desire for an identity politic. Most of those who have taken up Intersectionality have been able to extrapolate this ﬁrst observation. Intersectionality not
.’’16 We will note. then. Intersectional sensibility as that which interrupts this desire actually allows for more clarity about the functional gap between ‘‘antiracism’’ or ‘‘feminism’’ and ‘‘social justice. First.15 Chart 1
1st Figure Identity politics (Intersectionality) Concepts Antiracism Feminism Meanings Social Justice Internal exclusion marginalizations Illusions Intersectionality ‘‘Women of color’’ (version 1)
The bold in Chart 1. Moreover. this metaphorical act. or images. then antiracist discourse relies on a sexist politics. represents the ﬁrst metaphorical act under the deconstruction performed by the text. At the same time.

then the conﬂation of Intersectionality with identity politics becomes impossible. We might understand this ﬁrst deconstructive narrative as ‘‘tropological. This second observation is made clear by Crenshaw’s introductory remarks about the main objective of Intersectionality. Rather. as that is the precise function of metaphor. This positive naming has caused considerable confusion in the literature on intersectionality where the positive naming of the metaphor as an intersectional analytical framework hides the original metaphorical act. ﬂawed readings lie in the tendency to conﬂate the various illusions emerging from the metaphoric act in and as the ﬁgure under deconstruction. However. Crenshaw’s second observation recognizes the unknowability of the illusions (Intersectionality. Nonetheless. the Intersectionality in parenthesis then denotes the result of these ﬂawed readings. the intersectional location cannot be spoken from. then. They return the illusions back to the place of the ﬁrst ﬁgure of deconstruction to subject it to a ‘‘tropological’’ deconstructive narrative18 (hence. What Crenshaw’s writing takes as its goal is not. they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling.’’ in that the text gives it a name and positive representation as intersectionality. More to the point. which replace or conﬂate the ﬁrst ﬁgure of deconstruction with the illusion that arises from that very deconstruction. Crenshaw’s second critical comment. to speak from that untellable loca-
. or language in general. remains relatively untouched by crt.17 Flawed readings of this ﬁrst metaphorical act do not lie in failures to recognize both the metaphorical act and literal meaning.180
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only contains this metaphorical act. ‘‘When [feminist and antiracist] practices expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition. if the reader recognizes that Intersectionality is the product of the initial critical gesture of reading (which is decidedly not the case for identity politics). In Chart 1. attendant to this proper recognition of Intersectionality as it relates to the problem of knowing through language. Readings that only recognize the literal meaning are simply reductive ones. the renaming in crt of Intersectionality ad nauseum). My objective in this article is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. by grasping the signiﬁcance of inhabiting the prohibited margin as that experience of existing outside the realm of sociality. and cultural representation.’’19 Put simply. but also calls this metaphorical act an intersectional analytical framework. ‘‘women of color’’) except through structures of metaphorical acts. discourse.

Instead. For this reason.’’ ‘‘Women of color’’ only remains in the text as a referent that must be ﬂeshed out with history and actual experiences.21 Where the text facilitates
. marginalized existence does not make identitarian existence for such inhabitants impossible. Certainly. center and margin. takes as its meaning the ‘‘forgotten’’ rapes (on the week the national public began its prosecution to vindicate the Central Park jogger in 1989). Thus. in Intersectionality. not by way of that woman of color’s own description of her experiences. The reader ﬁnds that the presentation of this second observation is actually underwritten with a subtle. However. At the same time. This because the lethal nature of said violence silenced that woman of color by sentence of death. Further. Intersectionality appears. and originary. But this shift commences from the very real.Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
181
tion. intricate. In fact. Intersectionality’s single mention of ‘‘woman of color’’ is introduced. but rather to create a discursive shift so that that location might become somehow tellable—a shift to make it known. therefore. to reveal it.’’ and not ‘‘women of color. the ‘‘devaluation of Black women and the marginalizations of their sexual victimizations. we have the position of illusion ‘‘women of color’’ (version 1) takes in Chart 1.’’20 That is all to say that the ‘‘woman of color’’ referent ﬁnds meaning in the actual experiences of ‘‘Black women. and imaginative thought that distinguishes Intersectionality from all its succeeding applications and various appropriations in crt. and representational—in history. ‘‘woman of color. the precise signiﬁcance of ‘‘women of color’’ in the text cannot be seen unless we analyze the supplementary—allegorical— deconstructive narrative of Intersectionality.’’ as a referent. distinguishing this identitarian existence is precisely not the motivational issue of Intersectionality. account for it. problem of language that precludes that location as a site of enunciation. the ‘‘who’’ of Intersectionality is only ever textually ﬁgured as ‘‘the location of women of color. identity and heterogeneity. political.’’ Actual experiences are not ﬂeshed out by ‘‘women of color. as a play on the noncorrespondence of ‘‘woman of color’’ with ‘‘women of color’’ in order to preserve the tension between object and subject. it remains possible throughout Intersectionality to write of a detailed but necessarily unspeciﬁed kind of identity through references to ‘‘women of color’’ that function only to describe a location—structural.’’ and there is a key absence of a positive type to which ‘‘women of color’’ refers. but by way of a prosecutor’s and witness’s descriptions of that woman of color’s experience of violence.

’’ This dual role of Intersectionality makes this second deconstructive moment allegorical because it does not provide a new positive ﬁgure of deconstruction. deserves special attention because it provides the reader with two relationships to illusion.182
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the ﬂawed reading I mentioned above.’’ the illusion issues. is the problem of knowing and the attitude of skepticism. as a supplement to version 1. To elaborate the two relationships established between the illusion and the reading subject. and. a repaired reading is attempted here. Rather.22 Chart 2
2d Figure Intersectionality as Chart 1 Concepts Race Gender Meanings Violence Structural IS* Political IS Representational IS Illusions ‘‘women of color’’ (version 2)
* IS
Intersectionality
Having done the ﬁrst reading. we will ﬁrst note that the deconstructive force in Charts 1 and 2
. does not provide a new force of deconstruction. and that the recognition of this illusion is recognition of the failure of reading. It recognizes that there is no other name for Chart 1 other than the illusion that arises from the ﬁrst metaphorical act. First. and depicted below in Chart 2. is the problem of history and its effect on the reader. The illusion ‘‘women of color’’ (version 2). Chart 1 with the recognition of having passed through the ﬁrst deconstructive moment.’’ The metaphorical form of Intersectionality together with the gap between concepts and meanings in Chart 2 give rise to a supplemented illusion of ‘‘women of color’’ (version 2). Chart 2 differs from Chart 1 in that Intersectionality is both the ﬁgure under deconstruction and the force of deconstruction: Intersectionality (as Chart 1) and ‘‘Structural IS/Political IS/Representational IS. as mentioned above.’’ And ‘‘Structural IS/Political IS/Representational IS’’ is the deconstructive force in this particular metaphorical act that attempts to create a pure correspondence between ‘‘Race/Gender’’ and ‘‘Violence. it builds. Second. or ‘‘intersectional sensibility. the deconstructive meaning ‘‘marginalization and internal exclusions’’ is given the supplemental meaning ‘‘Violence. further. supplements. made evident in the way version 2 arises in Chart 2.

in order to better understand the larger signiﬁcance of my appreciation for the commitment in Intersectionality to the object and the intersectional sensibility it creates. while marginal existence cannot be spoken out of. ‘‘Hence Adorno . The experiencing subject fantasizes and speculates. In positing the problem of ‘‘a location that resists telling. through this commitment to the object. speaks of a ‘productive’ imagination . Adorno references ‘‘apparitions’’ in artwork as we have been discussing
.’’24 Nicholsen’s observation of this particular commitment to the object that both art and theory possess is part of the general Adornian insight that gives twentiethcentury aesthetic theory its critical edge.’’ Intersectionality commits thought to the problem of what it means to be an identity without history and. The process is as crucial to intellectual experience as it is to aesthetic experience. Indeed. political. This common relationship is premised on the ‘‘productive imagination’’ of the subject encountering the object for the creation of either art or theory. .’’23 and yet proceeds with its historical work (largely centered about the legal institution). . producing associations from the subject’s own experience. . Thus. and representational intersections of race and gender described in Intersectionality that interrupts the process of metaphorization. in her excellent study of Adorno’s aesthetics. illuminates this history. has described a common relationship between art and theory and their respective objects. to evoke the associative activity of the subject that accompanies or alternates with contemplative immersion in the details of the object. I turn to one of Adorno’s important theoretical contributions to aesthetic theory below.
Adorno’s Aesthetics
Shierry Weber Nicholsen.’’ and not to speak about or from the location of ‘‘women of color. the historicity of that existence ‘‘speaks’’ by and through this deconstructive force. Thus. which are then matched against what is perceived of the object. It is the historical accuracy of the structural. and not any actual ‘‘women of color’’ experience. the text seems to implicitly recognize this where Intersectionality intends only to ‘‘advance the telling. and subsequently interrupts the tropological process of deconstruction.Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
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arise from the historicity of the experiences of women of color. .

‘‘The linguistic habitus of ‘the world is as it is’ is the medium through which the social spell becomes aesthetic appearance [or an apparition]. it is a memento of the liquidation of the I. . . (245–46) Despite the fact that the aesthetic shudder results in a rejection of any semblance of the I. Adorno’s conceptualization of the shudder aptly captures the experience of reading that Intersectionality enables. For a few moments the I becomes aware. in real terms. [The shudder] provides no particular satisfaction for the I. it bears no similarity to desire. though it does not actually succeed in realizing this possibility. If an artwork successfully creates this apparition that can effect the
. semblance-shattering consciousness: that it itself is not ultimate.’’ Thus. it is through the aesthetic shudder that the reading subject is provided with an unmetaphorical and immediate sense of actuality.184
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illusions in metaphor. he writes. he notes. this aesthetic appearance. and the ‘‘social spell [that] becomes aesthetic appearance’’ as analogous to the collection of illusions we have been discussing thus far. It is not the aesthetic shudder that is semblance but rather its attitude to objectivity: In its immediacy the shudder feels the potential as if it were actual. of the possibility of letting selfpreservation fall away. and yet it is this realization that allows the subject to experience something that is not ‘‘as if. shaken. perceives its own limitedness and ﬁnitude’’ (245). For Adorno.’’26 We might take this linguistic habitus as analogous to the structure of metaphor in language. ‘‘The shudder is a response. . .’’ In one place. but semblance. Experiences are not ‘‘as if.25 More speciﬁcally. or illusion. is captured in the text as an apparition and is felt by the reader through what he calls the ‘‘shudder. . colored by fear of the overwhelming’’ (245). The I is seized by the unmetaphorical. which. the possibility of this experience enabled by the aesthetic shudder echoes the complete dissatisfaction on the part of Intersectionality with the fact that the particular historical experiences of women of color can only ever be metaphorical. It is through the aesthetic shudder that the subject realizes that there is only the metaphorical.’’ The disappearance of the I in the moment of the shudder is not real. Rather. . He adds in another place that the shudder is a type of experience that is ‘‘radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience.

suggestive. when encountered by the reader. more than ﬁfteen hundred women of color attended the ‘‘Color of Violence: Violence Against Women of Color’’ conference. then Adorno calls this a ‘‘social-ethical accomplishment’’ (260). The gathering would help to ‘‘imagine ways of attending to the ubiquitous violence in the lives of women of color that also radically subvert the institutions
. unknowable. As we have now been able to see (Charts 1 and 2). we should note that the divide between the apparition in the text and the shudder as an effect is somewhat artiﬁcial to the extent that both occur and exist through the reader’s encounter with the text. the process of reading metaphor entails an acute and self-conscious sense of history.Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
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shudder in its readings. descriptive. Intersectionality operates in more than three dimensions. . However. Angela Davis marked the event as one offering up both the contradictions and possibilities of the moment. uncategorical. and most of all. historical. the experience by the reader of something that is not ‘‘as if.’’27 It teaches us to read. this desire is premised on an ‘‘intersectional sensibility’’ and the openness of readers to subject themselves to the experience of the shudder. conceptual. while it might be possible to call Intersectionality a ‘‘social-ethical accomplishment. not as events of the past. it is the form of illusions that provides us with the space to exercise what Nicholsen has called ‘‘ ‘exact imagination’ . held at the University of California at Santa Cruz. but as past events that are instantiated by the work of a text and the reader’s desire to work with the text.
Ethic of Reading
In April 2000. Perhaps most important. effects a shudder. unrepresentable. . Thus. and yet illusory. I think it is possible to grasp a clearer understanding of ‘‘women of color’’ (version 2) in Intersectionality as this apparition that. Thus.’’ At this point. in an effort to redeﬁne antiviolence politics. [as] the experiencing subject’s ability to follow the quasi-logical relationships in the artwork with accuracy and precision.’’ this is true insofar as the encounter— between the reading subject and the text of Intersectionality—gives rise to the aesthetic shudder in the reader. Marginality reread as the concept of intersectionality—Intersectionality—imagines the possibility of identity that is unspeakable.

Can we. this primary question represented their ﬁrst encounter with the historical attempt by feminists of color to articulate an intersectional analytical framework.’’28 The contradiction of the moment: the institutions and discourses inhabited by the women of color caused the violence they desired to abate. which at the same time demonstrates the form of the concept as an ethics of reading. . the excerpt is self-conscious of the limits of rational analysis. In other words. Further. as the formation of political demands is bracketed by the desires for relief
. We might take the political desire of the conference.186
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and discourses within which we are compelled by necessity to think and work. The possibility of the moment: that same violence would drive the imaginations of women of color to depose these institutions and discourses. I offer Davis’s keynote address as an exemplary articulation of intersectionality as an analytical framework because of her substantive application of the framework in positing a ‘‘women of color’’ political agenda against violence. link a strong demand for remedies for women of color who are targets of rape and domestic violence with a strategy that calls for the abolition of the prison system?29 For many of the women in attendance. expressed in the event’s primary motivating question. and into bedrooms at home. for example. the questions Davis poses to encourage substantive analysis of state and interpersonal violence simultaneously demonstrate the questions themselves to be the product of her reading of the current political condition. then a challenge to that violence would have to make recourse to something other than necessity. if violence is engendered by our participation in institutions and discourses out of necessity. as the materialization of that ‘‘something else’’: One of the major questions facing this conference is how to develop an analysis that furthers neither the conservative project of sequestering millions of men of color in accordance with the contemporary dictates of global capital and its prison industrial complex. . to shelters. As the preceding passage demonstrates. nor the equally conservative project of abandoning poor women of color to a continuum of violence that extends from the sweatshops through the prisons. How do we develop analyses and organizing strategies against violence against women that acknowledge the race of gender and the gender of race? .

of stimulating further thought in those encountering it. The U. Thus. producer of meaning. how she asks and says those things. and most important. while at the same time demonstrating the usefulness of the
. Gina Dent has observed that one of the most important accomplishments of this conference is to foreground Native American ´ women within the category ‘‘women of color.Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
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from interpersonal violence and reversal of mass incarceration. an identiﬁcation of the speaker as a reader.S. sexist. This reference then allows Davis to extend and elaborate on the way in which the speciﬁc location of Native American women furthers the event’s political desire. of hinting at some future meaning. this passage demonstrates various modes of reading on several different levels: First. We might say that we get a sense of the passage not only through what Davis says or asks. she cites Crenshaw’s analysis of violence against women of color. reading as generative. The preceding passage expresses this impact on the speaker as a reader. and thus. the situation of Native American women shows that we must also include within our analytical framework the persisting colonial domination of indigenous nations and national formations within and outside the presumed territorial boundaries of the U. Crenshaw’s study is taken as ‘‘suggestive.S.’’ Expanding this adjective. among which crt is located. I would conclude by suggesting that the value of intersectionality as an analytical framework for critical approaches to race and gender studies. colonial state’s racist. and homophobic brutality in dealing with Native Americans once again shows the futility of relying upon the juridical or legislative processes of the state to resolve these problems. Second. we might think of the study as possessing a certain ability to evoke something beyond itself.30 In the same speech Davis delivered at the opening of the conference. While placing into relationship the category and the study.31 At once. but also. the passage remarks the study’s commitment to representing the heterogeneity of women’s experiences (‘‘women’’).’’ As Kimberle Crenshaw’s germinal study on violence against women suggests. The category ‘‘women of color’’ is maintained in an abstract but materially situated form. following Davis’s example. is lost if one element (the substantive) is privileged over the other (the formal) or vice versa. reading as feminist.

If they appear uniﬁed. We can see through Davis’s ethic of reading that intersectionality.’’ and ‘‘Native American’’ through the analytical framework’s attention to colonial domination—or by underscoring the category ‘‘women of color’’—reforms the language of the conference’s political motivation. moreover. it reﬂects a feminist practice of negotiation involved in reading itself. reading as ethical. The challenge of tracking this repetition contained in the analysis of this passage encourages its readers to understand reading as a social act. The naming of the analytical framework as ‘‘our’’ analytical framework presents the ethical question the concept demands as the product of a set of social practices working with and from a history of domination. broadens the social sphere in which Native American women bear inﬂuence. The repetition of ‘‘Native American women.188
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concept (‘‘ ‘women of color’ ’’) developed out of historical experiences.’’ are not based on uniﬁed identities or locations. taken together. Fourth. Naming it as such is an ethical gesture that recognizes both the epistemological limits of the concept and the alterity of the Other that exists beyond this limit. At the same time. The inclusion of colonial domination within the study’s analytical framework is accompanied by a demonstration of how the analytical framework. precisely because any such unity is deﬁed by the fact that the reader is structured into the framework and concept. by way of the repetition it enables. as an analytical framework. are an example of an ‘‘ethic of reading’’ that is perhaps the best way to approach intersectionality. and its corresponding concept of ‘‘women of color.32 Third.33 I believe that these observations. reading as social act. then the ethic of reading performed by Davis reveals such an effect as nothing less than the problem of language to impose this unity.’’ ‘‘the situation of Native American women. The subsequent discussion of Native American women’s situation seems less about a concern for identitarian inclusiveness then a concern for historically and politically situating the relationship of distinction between the heterogeneity of women’s experiences and the concept of ‘‘women of color. this ethic allows for the most generous and productive approach to intersectionality be-
.’’ The nuance with which the relationship of distinction is given form in the language of this passage reﬂects the feminist concern with negotiating the imperialism of language to subsume women as woman. This amounts to the reform of a discursive space in which Native Americans can be spoken about.

2. Contemp. Legal Issues 11 (2001): 691.’’ Stanford Law Review 42 (1990): 581. offered by her explicitly and implicitly. Finally. ‘‘Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory. Harris.g.’’ Berkeley Women’s L. and caste in the construction of women’s issues. ‘‘Introduction: Theorizing the Connections Among Systems of Subordination.’’ However. I close this reading with an acute sense of wariness in our present historical moment.. several critical race theorists have productively popularized ´ the term intersectionality. along with Crenshaw. In addition. Gary Peller. Proposing emphatically that crt reafﬁrm its commitment to ‘‘the critical. ‘‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality. ever posed but not pursued. the condition of possibility for social transformation and cultural life as such. ed. See Kimberle Williams Crenshaw. class. and speciﬁcally as it appears in ‘‘Mapping the Margins. However. Moran. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw. a genealogy of Crenshaw’s thought. see Robert S. 1995). ‘‘Anti-essentialism and Intersectionality: Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House. e. Identity Politics. However. United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women. Chi. Radhika Coomaraswamy.’’ Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241. this contemporary incitement by women of color—a demand for remedies to domestic violence and strategies for the abolition of the prison system— will remain a question still. Radhika Coomaraswamy.
Notes
1. and Violence Against Women of Color. and Nancy Levit.’’ UMKC Law Review 71 (2002): 485. intersectionality has evoked a broad range of topics.’’ UMKC Law Review 71 (2002): 227. Neil Gotanda. such can only proceed if we accept the insistence of Intersectionality on engaging. ‘‘Keynote Address Delivered for the Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues Conference on the Future of Intersectionality and Critical Race Feminism. For an intellectual history of the postintersectionality camp of crt.’’ in Human Rights of
. (1989): 139. and Antiracist Politics. feminist.. For this intimate relationship is. ‘‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine. 10 (1995) 16. reprinted in ´ Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. Feminist Theory.Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
189
cause of the different types of acts that reading becomes in the process— generative. the legal scholar Crenshaw. with increased diligence. and Angela P. I look forward to productive debate. Trina Grillo.’’ U.’’ which is to say an ethics of reading. Ethnicity.’’ J. To the extent that legal scholars and activists continue to undermine the development of intersectionality theory. ‘‘After Intersectionality. locates the concept speciﬁcally within the tradition of black feminist thought in the United States. Legal F.J. the globality. The term intersectionality is popularly attributed to the work of. See Beverly I. simply. See. and ethical. Chang and Jerrome McCristal Culp Jr. social. ‘‘To Bellow Like a Cow: Women. has emphasized ethnicity. of violence instantiated by the intersection of race and gender in the United States. and the Discourse of Rights. our intimate relationship with the ubiquity. and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press. 3.

Karen Wang. ed. Postmodernism. 8. 10.’’ 1265–82. ‘‘Intersections of Race. 39. by Pickford. Adorno. Crenshaw.’’ Asian L. . ‘‘Mapping the Margins. Spivak. the possibility of explanation carries the presupposition of an explainable (even if not fully) universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject. Peter Kwan. this intersectional sensibility would be akin to the attitude of skepticism towards metaphor that marks the ﬁrst moment of deconstruction in the act of reading. Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge.’’ 106.’’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. eds. 205–42.190
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Women: National and International Perspectives. Jameson observes this more generally when writing. ‘‘The will to explain [is] a symptom of the desire to have a self and a world. Crenshaw. ‘‘Mapping the Margins. 11. generates a variety of illusions. Gayatri Spivak. ‘‘Explanation and Culture. Frederic Jameson.’’ in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge. not as a ‘‘woman of color. 4. 205–42. Postmodernism.’’ 1296–99.’’ Jameson. which alludes to who such inhabitants might be. Neil Gotanda. Explaining. ‘‘Mapping the Margins. ‘‘Sexual Taboos and the Law Today. . Crenshaw. emphasis in original). 48 (1997): 1257. 24.’’ n. 18.’’ Hastings L. 205. According to Paul DeMan’s theory of reading.’’ 105. ‘‘Mapping the Margins. Spivak. ‘‘Battered Asian American Women: Community Responses from the Battered Women’s Movement and the Asian American Community. See note 15 above.. and Kendall Thomas. 1987). For an excellent history of crt as an intellectual movement. 3 (1996): 151. 15. 4. 23. 20. my emphasis. Ethnicity. trans. see Martin Jay. Theodor W. my emphasis. for example. Postmodernism. In an earlier passage.’’ 1242. the essay was presented in Critical Models as an expression of Adorno’s ‘‘practical motive . 8. . According to the preface. then. 22. ‘‘Explanation and Culture. Rebecca Cook (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 5. or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press. to promote political maturity by bringing reiﬁed consciousness to self-awareness’’ (vii). ´ 6. 9. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. ‘‘The metaphoric act constitutively involves the forgetting or repression of itself: concepts generated by metaphor at once conceal their origins and stage themselves as true or referential. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press.’’ n. These presuppositions assure our being. 1994). That process. see Kimberle Williams Crenshaw. on the general level. Crenshaw. 7. Marginalia. See. Crenshaw. ‘‘Explanation and Culture. 12. 242. Indeed. . Jameson. Charts 1 and 2 are based on Fredric Jameson’s general discussion of Paul DeMan and his theory of deconstruction as reading. 20. 21. 4. Crenshaw. such advance is made by Crenshaw’s rereading of race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. 1923–1950 (Boston: Little. 1995). Jameson. 105.’’ 1267. Jameson. . xiii–xxxii. 1991). ‘‘Mapping the Margins. 1998). Mass. and Sexual Orientation: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Cosynthesis of Categories. Henry W. 16.
. ‘‘Mapping the Margins. Gary Peller. J. we exclude the possibility of the radically heterogeneous’’ (105. 1973). In other words. Crenshaw. 1997). Gender. Postmodernism. Exact Imagination. For an excellent history of the Frankfurt School and critical theory.’’ n. 19.’’ but as a black feminist constituted by her intervention. Class.: MIT Press. we ﬁnd that they are those whose radically different experiences render the universe unexplainable and incapacitate the subject from explaining. Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research. 71. J. Postmodernism. 205. 17. 13. Brown. ‘‘Mapping the Margins. 14.

1984). However. generally. 32. 29. Mass. references to the concept in crt have demonstrated an understanding that the concept is constituted by both its substantive and formal elements. Teresa de Lauretis. 28.e. 26. a lack of such a review does not preclude what the present chapter attempts to illuminate. i. 95. Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 33. Davis. 30. ‘‘Ethics and the Face. trans.org . my emphases. Exact Imagination. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism.. See also www. keynote speech. See. transcription of keynote speech on ﬁle with author. keynote speech. Alfonso Lingis (Hingham. 1990). Emmanuel Levinas. Few. Adorno. Davis.
. Here.: Kluwer Boston.Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder
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25. Davis. 230. the appropriation of the concept in crt has largely taken up the concept’s formal elements to leave to the wayside its substantive elements. I am only noting the problem of crt’s noncritique of intersectionality.national-incite. Angela Y. 19. trans. Theodor Adorno. In fact. about which a more comprehensive review will follow in the future. if any. 36. 1979). Aesthetic Theory. Nicholsen. 31. the pedagogical impulses of intersectionality to teach us to read.’’ in Totality and Inﬁnity: An Essay on Exteriority. Semiotics. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Further page references are cited parenthetically in the text. Aesthetic Theory. 27.

.

. an insurmountable barrier. and the exact features of this death will be hidden for ever from the relatives of the patient and the world at large. If we told our patients the truth. nineteenth-century French physiologist. On the contrary . My scruples are founded on the simple fact that operations with chloroform. . . For cognition the gap between us and others was the same as the time between our own present and past suffering. The public is misled by the fact that after an operation the patient is unable to remember what he has undergone. . the nervous substance loses a considerable part of its ability to absorb traces of impressions. are made possible only by the process of oblivion. . Dialectic of Enlightenment
In the notes to the Dialectic of Enlightenment.9
An-aesthetic Theory
Adorno. . Sexuality. the suspicion would then arise that our relationship with men and creation in general was like our relationship with ourself after an operation—oblivion for suffering. it is probably that not one of them would wish to have an operation performed under chloroform. and Memory
Mary Anne Franks
I still cannot decide to agree to the use of chloroform in general surgical practice. have an illusory success. Dialectic of Enlightenment If Flourens had been right here . . . But perennial domination over nature. . quoted in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. . Under the inﬂuence of chloroform. It is possible that the painful stimuli which because of their speciﬁc nature may well exceed all known sensations of this kind. . may lead to permanent mental damage in the patient or even to an undescribably painful death under narcosis. Adorno and Horkheimer cite Pierre Flourens’s reservations about medical anesthesia to suggest that they can be read as a larger statement on the condition of the modern social order. This process of oblivion. —Adorno and Horkheimer. where they all insist on its use now because we shroud the truth in silence. . and presumably also with the other forms of narcosis. pain is experienced even more strongly than in the normal condition. is accomplished not only through increasing technological domina-
. . All objectiﬁcation is a forgetting. . Would this not be too high a price to pay for progress? —Pierre Flourens. medical and non-medical techniques. but it does not lose the power of sensation as such. This an-aesthetic process is at work in our relationship both to the suffering of others and to our own suffering. . this psychosocial anesthesia. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the physical ‘‘process of oblivion’’—forgetting suffering—involved in medical anesthesia is psychologically replicated in our ethical relationships. .

For Adorno. the culture industry—which includes television. ﬁlm. but from the last remaining thought of resistance. pleasure ‘‘always means not to think about anything. but awareness of the wrongs perpetrated against human beings. stupeﬁed existence that actively represses the consideration of human suffering through mindless diversions and ‘‘entertainment. This degradation of sensibility is the degradation of the aesthetic in Adorno’s mind—the aesthetic whose purpose is not diversion or amusement.’’1 Adorno’s critique of ‘‘sensual appeal’’ demonstrates his suspicion of the pleasure that the culture industry so insistently promises to deliver. Adorno’s visionary aesthetic goal—of true aesthetic representation that radically decenters the viewer and compels him or her to resist the world as it is—can disrupt the stagnant ideological ﬁeld of universally accepted sexual violence. It is ﬂight. offering a sensuous immediacy that reinforces the distance between the subject that consumes and the object that suffers: Adorno writes ‘‘while the artwork’s sensual appeal seemingly brings it close to the consumer.’’ It is my claim in this chapter that Adorno’s critique of what could be called the ‘‘an-aesthetic’’ administered by the culture industry. This cannot be accomplished if suffering is presented as an object of consumption. The liberation which amusement promises is free-
. art’s duty is to oppose itself to the suffering that takes place in reality. is especially appropriate to contemporary cultural representations of sexual violence. it is alienated from him by being a commodity that he possesses and the loss of which he must constantly fear. It is basic helplessness. In Adorno’s view. ﬂight from a wretched reality. aimed at reconciling them with a consumption-driven. to forget suffering even when it is shown. According to Adorno’s political aesthetics.194
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tion of our bodies by but also through the diversionary trappings of the culture industry (and these two intersect signiﬁcantly in modern times). The culture industry makes a commodity of every emotion and experience. The deadening effect of the compulsive and consumptive representation of female sexuality in popular culture depoliticizes and naturalizes sexual violence against women. which actively seeks to erase the sensitivity to and memory of suffering. as is asserted. The culture industry domesticates people through an endless supply of products. Adorno’s aesthetic position of Betroffenheit (concern) can serve as a powerful weapon against the accommodation of sexual violence hegemonic in the world today. and advertising—erodes the human capacity to recognize and resist suffering. not.

refusing to appropriate it.5 ‘‘The world of imagery. There must be something ﬁnally ‘‘unassimilable’’ about the true work of art. mechanical reproduction has the potential to liberate art from ritual. As Adorno writes. could have a liberating effect.4 Although Benjamin himself by no means embraced mechanical reproduction unreservedly. and as Shierry Nicholsen writes. uplifted. ‘‘[T]he spectator must not project what transpires in himself on to the artwork in order to ﬁnd himself conﬁrmed.’’6 Adorno felt that Benjamin seriously underestimated the possibility of ‘‘the misuse of aesthetic rationality for mass exploitation and mass domination. itself thoroughly historical. . Adorno’s conception of the aura differed in many ways from Walter Benjamin’s. is done an injustice by the ﬁction of a world of images that effaces the relations in which people live. .or herself. accomplished through mechanical reproduction.’’ especially regarding photography and cinema. but must. assimilate himself to it. whose essay ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’’ (1968) outlined potentially positive consequences of technological reproducibility.7 Kafka’s claim that ‘‘we photograph things in order to drive them out of our
. It is the exact opposite of the aesthetic sensibility Adorno proposes: the posture of radical openness to the other’s suffering.An-aesthetic Theory
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dom from thought and from negation. Adorno’s invocation of Pierre Flourens is thus clear: the culture industry offers (imposes) an anti-aesthetic—an an-aesthetic—an imposed loss of feeling that does not actually prevent suffering but only the active remembering of it. and satisﬁed in it. it is an experience of being touched by the other’s suffering and. By contrast. this aesthetic concern. especially in photography and ﬁlm. its unique situation in time and space. fulﬁll the work in its own terms. his enthusiasm for this potential is understandable against the background of Fascist monumentalism.’’2 The culture industry’s promise of pleasure is a promise to depoliticize suffering. Adorno was even less optimistic than Benjamin regarding the loss of the aura. is for Adorno signiﬁcantly bound up with the artwork’s aura.’’3 This feeling-beyond-oneself. . According to Benjamin. In that essay Benjamin proposed that the loss of an artwork’s aura. on the contrary. relinquish himself to the artwork. something that moves the viewer out of him. the genuine aesthetic moment for Adorno involves a sense of concern (Betroffenheit) that goes beyond mere sensuous feeling ¨ (Gefuhl). signiﬁcantly. to neutralize and negotiate with it. [H]e must submit to the discipline of the work rather than demand that the artwork give him something.

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minds’’ is expressive of this point.8 Adorno’s sensitivity to this tendency to drive out of mind—to forget—must be read in the context of ‘‘the darkest moments of culture, moments where precisely through recourse to sensual experience and the aestheticization of culture millions were murdered.’’9 The reproduced photographic image both afﬁrms and invites the ‘‘promiscuous acceptance of the world,’’ to use Susan Sontag’s phrase. Such images, by destroying suffering’s particular presence in time and space—its aura—become an ideological support of that suffering. When an image is reproduced and commodiﬁed, the very pathos that it might invite ultimately ‘‘justiﬁes the world which makes it necessary.’’10 Terrence des Pres echoes this sentiment when he notes that ‘‘thanks to the technological expansion of consciousness, we cannot not know the extent of political torment; and in truth it may be said that what others suffer, we behold. The triumph of technology has created two classes which can coexist in the same person: those who suffer, and those who observe that suffering.’’11 This observation of suffering leads us not to intervene or resist it, but rather to become indifferent to it, or worse, to obtain pleasure in viewing it. Thus when Adorno comments that ‘‘aura is not only—as Benjamin claimed—the here and now of the artwork, it is whatever goes beyond its factual givenness, its content; one cannot abolish it and still want art,’’ he seems to suggest that, contrary to Benjamin, one should decry the loss of aura in mechanical reproduction and maintain the aesthetic position of preserving that aura.12 However, Adorno at the same time agreed with Benjamin that the culture industry itself can manipulate aura and turn it into ‘‘cult value.’’ ‘‘Entertainment art adulterates on the one hand the real layer of the aesthetic, which is divested of its mediation and reduced to mere facticity, to information and reportage; on the other hand, it rips the auratic element out of the nexus of the work, cultivates it as such, and makes it consumable. Every close-up in every commercial ﬁlm mocks aura by contriving to exploit the contrived nearness of the distant, cut off from the work as a whole. Aura is gulped down along with the sensual stimuli; it is the uniform sauce that the culture industry pours over the whole of its manufacture.’’13 Even or especially aura, then, can become a support of the ‘‘logic of familiar things,’’ even as the expulsion of that aura also serves this logic.14 Despite this danger, Adorno argues that the aura’s potential to evade and thus go beyond ‘‘ideological superﬁcies’’ is too important to disregard the way Benjamin seems to.15 Benjamin himself, Adorno points out, cred-

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ited early photography for presenting an aura that demonstrated the viewed object’s ability to ‘‘look back.’’ Adorno suggests that we should concentrate on this potential of the aura, the peculiar combination of closeness and distance, that brings us to the genuine aesthetic and to the truly ethical moment. If art and culture’s task in a brutalized and brutalizing world is to expose suffering and encourage resistance, it can only do so by refusing to reproduce and commodify it: it has to preserve that suffering’s fundamental unassimilability. The image of suffering should not gratify sensuous feeling or evoke a sense of possession. Although one must be in some way ‘‘close’’ to the image, this closeness cannot be maintained without the acknowledgment of the distance that ﬁnally exists between viewer and viewed; and as Kaja Silverman writes, mere closeness ‘‘signiﬁes possession, that ‘belong-to-me’ quality which is such a notable feature of certain contemporary images. It implies not only the substitution of the subject’s own frame of reference for that speciﬁc to the object, but the possibility of ‘getting hold’ of it at ‘very short range,’ i.e., of appropriating it.’’16 An auratic work, by contrast, resists becoming subject to the viewer’s pleasure, or jouissance. The aesthetic ‘‘shudder’’ of which Adorno speaks ‘‘does not provide a satisfaction to the ego and is removed from desire.’’17 When Adorno writes that the true aesthetic response involves concern, this concern means ‘‘the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken.’’18 My contention, then, is that the an-aesthetic of the culture industry speciﬁcally targets the aura of objects. It refuses to encourage or even allow auratic representations of certain kinds of suffering, particularly those related to sexuality. The use of auratic here should be distinguished from Benjamin’s pejorative use of the word, and Adorno’s concurring critical remarks about the commodiﬁed aura, to indicate the complex nearness/distance that grounds the possibility of real ethical feeling, of ‘‘concern.’’ The culture industry’s an-aesthetic disrespects the speciﬁc presence in time and space of suffering or sensuously commodiﬁes that speciﬁcity (creating cultic value for that suffering), or does both. An authentically auratic representation of suffering would exclude any accommodation, acceptance, or redemption of the causes of that suffering, while maintaining a certain respectful (but not ritualizing) distance from that suffering. The feeling—the literal aesthetic—that auratic suffering should inspire must be a full shock of the other’s pain that is yet not appropriated by one’s own desire or made consumable in any way. As

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´ Lopez writes, ‘‘[A]esthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it.’’19 The culture industry largely devotes the administration of its anesthetic against the perception of sexual violence. As des Pres points out, in the contemporary world one can no longer not know of the suffering of others—including that of millions of women and female children around the world. In our technologically advanced society we now hear and see accounts of rape warfare in the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Rwanda, the Congo; sexual trafﬁcking of Eastern European women; girls sold into sex tourism in Thailand; the unsolved and largely unremarked (by ofﬁcial governmental and criminal institutions) murders of young women in Ju´ arez, Mexico. The world knows that sexual inequality and the oppression of women by men, both explicitly and in more subtle ways, goes on even in our ‘‘liberal’’ day: ‘‘honor’’ killings in Muslim countries; female genital mutilation in African, Middle Eastern and Far Eastern countries; domestic violence in every part of the world. And yet in the West, we continue to have great difﬁculty identifying sexual violence as one of ‘‘our’’ real problems—unlike tax cuts or terrorism, sexual violence has yet to even make its way into being a signiﬁcant part of any major political platform in the United States. But the statistics speak volumes: in the United States, approximately one out of every six women has been raped in her lifetime20 and between 3 and 4 million women experience domestic violence (including rape) every year.21 What explains how a phenomenon that is so widespread, so common, and so (at least recently) reported still persists? No American would publicly condone rape warfare, the oppression of women under the Taliban, or the practice of throwing acid in the faces of Indian women who have rejected suitors. But violence against women keeps happening both ‘‘over there’’ and ‘‘over here.’’ In our ‘‘enlightened,’’ liberal society, many women are raped, tortured, and murdered. Western resignation to this phenomenon seems inexplicable. Some explanation for the West’s lack of resistance lies in our very representation of sexual violence, or rather the preemptive representation of sexuality that portrays every imaginable sexual atrocity within the range of legitimate ‘‘visual pleasure.’’ This is perhaps made most apparent by the fact that the most disturbing images from some of the worst crimes in history have been appropriated by pornography with no public censure or outcry.22 Naked women wearing gas masks or pressed against barbed wire are a staple in Israeli

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pornography; African American women shackled at the hands and feet being beaten with whips appear regularly in American pornography. More recently, some of the images depicting American soldiers raping Iraqi women at the Abu Ghraib prison were dismissed as ‘‘only’’ pornography—while such acts have reportedly taken place in reality, the pictures in question were ‘‘bogus,’’ allegedly taken from an Internet porn site.23 The very same images that were condemned as ‘‘atrocities’’ when they were believed to have taken place at Abu Ghraib were celebrated or dismissed when discovered to have been staged for entertainment. As Susan J. Brison pointedly asked regarding the American response to the ‘‘real’’ torture that took place at Abu Ghraib, ‘‘Given our tolerant, even self-congratulatory, attitude toward pornography, why should we be so shocked when torture takes this form? Why should it be cause for international alarm when sexually degrading, dehumanizing things are done to Iraqi prisoners (and photographed) if doing the same things to women around the world (and photographing them) for a multibillion-dollar pornography industry is considered entertainment?’’24 When images that bear testament to the worst excesses of racism and cruelty are ripped from their context of suffering and transposed into a context of ‘‘entertainment’’ and ‘‘pleasure,’’ this effect is to suggest that the subjects involved enjoy or deserve the pain inﬂicted upon them—in reality as well. Several survivors of the ‘‘rape camps’’ in the former Yugoslavia reported the presence of video cameras during the rapes, and there are numerous reports of these videos being distributed and sold, among them claims that these tapes have found their way into the Los Angeles pornography market. In September 1992, the ﬁlms of at least two of these rapes were broadcast on Serb-controlled television.25 A few years ago, when I gave a presentation about these events and asked if we should not be extremely disturbed that what is being consumed as ‘‘pornography’’ could be in fact, unknown to us, the depiction of a brutal rape, a woman responded that perhaps it is more disturbing to think that even if the violence were known, it either would not matter to the viewer or it would increase his pleasure in viewing it. Conﬁrmation of this is all too easily found: a quick Internet search using the keyword rape yields, among Web sites offering research tools and resources on the topic of sexual violence, countless sites advertising ‘‘100% real rape,’’ ‘‘hard-core non-consensual sex,’’ ‘‘the most violent rape pix ever.’’ These sites offer pictures of ‘‘raped Chechen women,’’ ‘‘young girl brutally raped by three men,’’ ‘‘tiny teen gang-

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raped.’’ Some of the sites run disclaimers in extremely small print that the women portrayed are in fact eighteen or older and consenting, and that no real images of rape are published on the site; some do not. It is at this extreme end of the pornographic spectrum that one confronts the truth of all pornography: a woman’s consent to sex is at best a matter of indifference in pornography and very often seen as irrelevant, and in the worst case, the violent imposition of sex on a nonconsenting woman is itself presented as an arousing spectacle. The objections are not difﬁcult to imagine: the liberal response would be to condemn these extreme images (though most likely not to argue, as is argued with child pornography, that such pornography warrants police investigations and crackdowns on purveyors and consumers) and to argue that mainstream pornography is a very different case altogether. The women are of legal age and clearly consent to the activity depicted. Unfortunately, even this is not true: porn star Traci Lords made more than a hundred hard-core ﬁlms before she turned eighteen and was a Penthouse centerfold at the age of ﬁfteen. Until her age was made known to the authorities and the tapes and magazine banned, the image of Traci Lords’s body—her child’s body—was consumed as a sexual object. The fact that this was not explicitly known only testiﬁes to the deep ambiguity of the pornographic image. A few years after Deep Throat (the ﬁrst mainstream porn ﬁlm) was released, its star, Linda Marchiano, claimed that she was raped on the set. Although she fought to have videos of the ﬁlm recalled, she was unsuccessful and rental sales actually went up once her allegations were made public. Those who cast doubt on Marchiano’s credibility can do so (but should perhaps acknowledge that in their efforts to insist that pornography is actually an empowering industry, they have to revile, ´ belittle, and throw the worst cliches of misogyny at women to do so—in effect saying, The whore lied), but whether her claims were true or not is ultimately irrelevant to the fact that viewers who thought is was true found the movie even more appealing for this fact. There are numerous examples of such troubling ambiguity. The controversial documentary Raw Deal: A Question of Consent tells the story of the stripper Lisa Gier King, whose performance at a frat party ended, she claimed, in rape.26 The entire evening was ﬁlmed by one of the men at the party, and this videotape was the evidence that police viewed to decide that King was lying and to charge her with making a false report. The state attorney released this videotape to the general public (purportedly to demonstrate the reasoning behind the controversial decision)

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over King’s protests, and local men scrambled to get copies of it. The tape made for common viewing at subsequent fraternity parties. One of the most revealing objections against treating both Marchiano’s and King’s claims seriously takes the form of ‘‘but she doesn’t look like she’s being forced’’—but this is precisely the question: how could she? In a video or an Internet image, how could one tell if a woman was being raped or not, unless the caption said so? Film critics who watched Raw Deal seemed surprised by the fact that the videotaped footage does not answer the question of whether rape occurred or not—it is impossible to tell. What is beyond dispute is that many people who believe it is a recording of a rape are able to watch the videotape for entertainment. It is telling that many of the images displayed on ‘‘rape’’ sites are identical to images one ﬁnds on ‘‘mainstream’’ Web sites, where the women supposedly do consent. In fact, often the only thing that changes is the caption—the very same image is ‘‘blonde whore taken anally and loving it’’ on one site and ‘‘young blonde Chechen viciously raped’’ on another. The viewer looking for depictions of ‘‘consensual’’ sex and the viewer looking for images of rape are looking at the same image. It is this indifference of the image, and not the supposedly disproved causal relationship between rape and pornography, that should be addressed and conceptualized in the discussion of sexual violence. The photographic image in itself cannot demonstrate consent. The illusion that it can is used to shield consumers of pornography from any association with ‘‘real’’ sexual violence. If mainstream pornography by its very nature asserts that all the women depicted ‘‘want it,’’ then no one has to engage the difﬁcult question of, How could I tell if they didn’t? (and further, Would I care if they didn’t?). One can condemn violent pornography and child pornography and real sexual violence without ever feeling implicated; and then one can throw out the word consent like a rhetorical hand grenade and run away. But mainstream pornography is an ideology. It is based on the photographic, ‘‘real’’ image, which is in itself ideological. As Adorno writes, ‘‘[I]deology is split into the photograph of stubborn life and the naked lie about its meaning—which is not suggested and yet drummed in.’’27 The mechanically reproduced pornographic image is ideological because it takes what is unique in time and space—whether a genuinely consenting sexual act or an act of sexual violence—and projects it across all time and space. In that gesture the image ‘‘rips the auratic element out’’ of the portrayed act and turns it into a commodity; recall Adorno’s claim that ‘‘every close-up in every commercial ﬁlm mocks aura by con-

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triving to exploit the contrived nearness of the distant, cut off from the work as a whole’’—is the pornographic ﬁlm not the clearest exponent of this? In Lisa Gier King’s case, she voluntarily agreed to strip for the party, and be ﬁlmed doing it, but was unaware that this tape would be reproduced and made available to the public. She claims furthermore that the videotape shows her being raped; whether she is telling the truth or not—and are fraternity boys to decide, especially considering that one of them declared at the beginning of the videotape that the proceedings would include ‘‘the raping of a white trash, crack whore bitch’’?—she certainly had no control over the fate of her sexual image. We know of Benjamin’s unease regarding the mechanical reproduction of the face: ‘‘people no longer have faces when the face itself becomes a fetishized commodity’’28 —but what of the fate of the body? In pornography, mainstream and otherwise, a woman’s body is endlessly reproduced, out of context and very often against her will. Linda Marchiano is only one of several women who have claimed that they were forced to take part in a pornographic scenario under threatening circumstances. Whether one decides to believe women who claim that they have been raped on set, there is no way to guarantee that it did not occur. A raped woman will also lose any control over her image, which can make its way to a ‘‘consensual’’ Web site with a caption announcing both to her and anyone who wants to take a look that she did consent. Her consent in this case is a fabrication, and yet looking at the image no one can discern this. Moreover, as uncomfortable as it may be for a liberal viewpoint, sexual violence and pornography often do share the same ideological space. The rape camps in the former Yugoslavia were reportedly steeped in pornographic images, on the walls, on tanks, in the soldiers’ rooms. According to the Yugoslavian critic Bogdan Tirnamic, the former Yugoslavia has the ‘‘freest pornography market in the world.’’ Serbian tanks were reportedly ‘‘plastered with pornography’’ according to witnesses, and rape victims have testiﬁed to the pervasive presence of pornographic materials in the camps.29 Several survivors have reported that the walls of the rooms in which they were raped as well as the ofﬁcers’ chambers were covered with pornographic pictures. The soldiers reportedly showed pornography to their victims to illustrate what they were going to do to them. Survivors also report that in some cases the soldiers reenacted scenes from the pornographic materials when raping the women. Serbian soldiers them-

lack of any evidence or concern for her consent. one could protest that the average consumer of pornography is just looking. The average pornography consumer is just a passive viewer who has nothing to do with the actual execution of sexual violence. It is the same mindset behind laws still in existence in many countries today that allow men who rape their wives and girlfriends to argue.30 And even though pornography consumers know this. It is not difﬁcult to see how one can progress from indifference to a woman’s consent to arousal at her refusal. Larry Flynt). there is a connection between what we look at for pleasure and entertainment and what we are capable of doing to another human being. To get together with their fellow soldiers and gang-rape a female Iraqi prisoner who has no possible means of escape or resistance. ‘‘once consented. but nonetheless he doesn’t commit any actual crimes himself. our free society protects the right of men to have violent. irrespective of circumstances or context. according to his daughter. As Katharine Viner writes apropos the abuse at Abu Ghraib. but this doesn’t make every man who uses pornography a sex offender. misogynist fantasies and indulge in them as long as they do not act them out (such was the message of the highly popular ﬁlm The People vs. after all. to assist those who were having difﬁculty getting an erection. A consent merely stipulated across time and space. not a rapist. he’s a consumer. they do not think about it when they get their newest issue of Playboy. It is hard not to see links between the culturally unacceptable behaviour of the soldiers in Abu Ghraib and the culturally ac-
. or images of guns inserted in the bloodspattered crotches of headless women. He may be a repugnant person who gets off on images of terriﬁed girls forced into sex.31 The ethical question to ask is why some men do it. But someone is acting them out (including. To override a woman’s protests. lies at the core of rapist logic. belongs to the logic of rape just as much as explicitly forcing a woman against her will. As repulsive as this might be.An-aesthetic Theory
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selves have conﬁrmed that pornography was frequently used during the rapes. or see how the two at least intersect. and maybe these images are not faked. always consented. The mainstream Web site and the rape Web site present the same images for a reason: indifference to a woman’s consent.’’ But even if one concedes all this. Larry Flynt himself). Of course all or almost all sex offenders use pornography (a fact that is not mentioned very often). To rape a young girl repeatedly and bash her head in with a brick. how some men are able to do it.

joyless. in ﬁlms and TV most sex is violent. in their exhibitionism.204
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cepted actions of what happens in porn. So Charles Graner and his colleagues can humiliate Iraqi prisoners because the prisoners are dirt. And the victims in both don’t have feelings: to the abusers. the images in both are the same. Porn hasn’t even pretended to show loving sex for decades. this image that without a headline or an accompanying story is indistinguishable from the images on the Internet. on some level. The question must be asked: How can we then behold the literal images of rape—the videotape of the woman raped and beaten by Serbian soldiers? Or the picture of Iraqi women gang-raped by U. they either wanted or deserved it. forcing them to bare their bodies and raping them. in newsstands. and the stipulation that the
. administered to keep us from conceptualizing and resisting the reality of sexual violence. The pornographic culture has clearly inﬂuenced the soldiers. It reassures us that it doesn’t really hurt. soldiers? How will we see it. they can humiliate women. Pornography reinforces the idea that one can commodify consent and buy it like a cheap magazine.S.’’33 Pornography—from the smiling Playboy centerfold to the struggling ‘‘Chechen woman’’—is a social an-aesthetic. And yet. Both point to just how degraded sex has become in western culture. because that way they can show their power. in this day and age. to the punter they don’t in pornography. Of course there is a gulf between them. their enthusiasm to photograph their handiwork. even in so-called political journals in Yugoslavia and Israel? How will we see her suffering? The pornographic an-aesthetic has not only obliterated the context of suffering but has imposed onto its image the compulsion for viewers to enjoy it. and it is insulting to suggest that all porn actors are in the same situation as Iraqis. in our neighborhoods and our cities and in every neighborhood and every city. at the very least. conﬁned and brutalised in terrifying conditions. that since everyone is smiling nothing bad could really have happened. The Abu Ghraib torturers are merely acting out their culture: the sexual humiliation of the weak.32 How it is that there can be so many men. they didn’t in Abu Ghraib. And even if they’re not smiling we know that. who cannot see a woman as a human being? As an other who feels pain or suffering that shocks us in its intensity instead of exciting or arousing us? ‘‘Our relationship with men and creation in general [is] like our relationship with ourselves after an operation—oblivion for suffering.

is equally that of hatred for Jews.’’ The alleged sexual appeal of her broken-into body is the kind of beauty Adorno and Horkheimer are referring to when they write that ‘‘mutilation is an added luster to female beauty. This enrages the strong.An-aesthetic Theory
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woman herself enjoys it.’’36 To ensure that neither the givers nor the bearers of that wound recognize it as such. The woman gang-raped by Serbian soldiers or by U. shaved pubes. now arouses only an irresistible urge to indulge in efﬁcient manslaughter. it is ridiculous to suggest that most women who appear in pornography are forced to have plastic surgery and herded onto porn sets at gunpoint (although it should perhaps be noted that women have claimed that this does happen. and a ‘‘naughty look. In ‘‘Man and Animal. The pornographic an-aesthetic prevents us from seeing or feeling a depiction of rape as the suffering of the other.’’35 The caricature that pornography offers is a woman with gigantic. excessive makeup. one can object. artiﬁcial breasts. an embarrassing reminder of its origin in and degeneration from nature. with grotesquely lengthened or enlarged limbs.’’ beauty that is itself ‘‘that display of the wound in which subjugated nature recognizes itself. The Jew was depicted as a kind of monster. is the very element which gives them life. who must always suppress their fear. the greater afﬁnity to nature which perennial oppression produces in them. Adorno and Horkheimer were keenly aware of the role that visual representations play in forming murderous prejudices. seemingly humorous exaggeration of the Jewish caricature: ‘‘An over-accentuated human face. and even if it does not char-
. and bearing the brand of domination on her forehead. a glint in his eye suggesting that he more than deserves the punishment he will ultimately experience. They live. They identify themselves with nature when they hear their victims utter over and over again the cry that they dare not themselves emit. However.’’34 The capacity to caricature is linked to the capacity to murder and to ignore murder. although they could be exterminated. the culture industry deploys a vast number of images that pass off carefully structured violence as spontaneous beauty. soldiers is any nameless woman held down by any nameless men and we have already conﬁgured our response—to enjoy her suffering—to that image. and note the darkness that lurks behind the seemingly innocuous. Women and Jews can be seen not to have ruled for thousands of years.S. Adorno and Horkheimer also noted the connection between anti-Semitism and misogyny: ‘‘The justiﬁcation of hatred for woman that represents her as intellectually and physically inferior.’’ Adorno and Horkheimer discuss caricature. and their fear and weakness.

threats to loved ones. sometimes even as feminist practice? Surely there is some legitimate motivation for their decision. The grand exception to this is when women sell their bodies for sexual consumption. and women can often make quite a lot of money in it. Zizek argues that Hannah Arendt overlooks one crucial factor in her analysis of the Nazis: the enjoyment. If men’s enjoyment is problematic. and ﬁnancial despair that is the background story of so many ‘‘consenting adults. One cannot blame the huge success of the porn industry solely on men. The second response must be to more closely examine what is meant by enjoyment.’’37 The ﬁnancial incentive to enter the sex industry is yet another point to reﬂect upon: the majority of jobs traditionally associated with women (cooking. Juliet MacCannell writes that for Adorno. many women argue that their work in the porn industry is empowering. what about women’s? The ﬁrst response to this is that sexual consent in the sex industry is a treacherously complex issue. cultural pressure. The fact that a woman is not threatened at gunpoint to perform in a porn ﬁlm or become a prostitute does not meant that she was not coerced in some other way—whether by economic circumstance. if not thousands. . In his critique of her ‘‘banality of evil’’ theory. Adorno sees the defence against enjoyment as crucial to the subject. and so forth) hardly pay enough to live on. is a darker affair than the culture industry would have us believe. In her essay on Adorno.39 What else accounts for the
. after all. abuse. as did the later Lacan. of reports of exploitation. lucrative. or some other source of intimidation. A society characterized by a genuine sense of concern for all its members must surely address this tragic valuation of women and the social contribution they are allowed or encouraged to make. . and makes it truer of his aesthetic than of Kant’s because Adorno saw through. cleaning. Anyone wishing to argue that women by and large make autonomous decisions to enter the sex trade should inform themselves of the hundreds. it couldn’t function without willing volunteers. to a secret enjoyment hidden in its ‘disinterestedness.206
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acterize the ‘‘majority’’ of experiences. Slavoj ˇˇ Zizek’s insights into ‘‘jouissance’’ in the context of the Holocaust are ˇˇ enlightening here. one is tempted to ask how many times it would need to happen before it became relevant). ‘‘preservation of the object against a culturally calculated desire is necessary to preserve the subject. then. the jouissance that many of the Nazi ofﬁcers experienced in torturing and killing Jews.’ ’’38 Enjoyment. . How does one explain this—should we not after all consider that regardless of how men may or may not view pornography.

This exceeds the combined gross of ABC. or play music even as they were forced to dig mass graves? Although psychoanalysis usually focuses on a subject’s jouissance in terms of pleasure-in-pain. As MacCannell writes in a particularly brilliant passage. the an-aesthetizing effect of the culture industry does not only affect our ability to recognize the suffering of others. But even if this ﬁgure is wrong or if there is no way to reliably prove that this is the case.S. ‘‘For Lacan. sing. • Two hundred million copies of Hustler.An-aesthetic Theory
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behavior of Nazi commandants ordering prisoners to dance. we continue with MacCannell’s reading of Lacan-with-Adorno: for Lacan. Adorno suggests that the culture industry deploys pleasure to undermine the resistance to existing wrongs. is always positive. • The combined circulation of Playboy and Penthouse exceeds that of Time and Newsweek. a picture of that industry as a massive restaging and appropriation of unbearable pain emerges. a subject traumatized by being made the imaginary object of the Other’s enjoyment will repeatedly restage their horror as that enjoyment in a fantasy adjusted to grant them relief from that abuse. CBS. • The average age at which men ﬁrst see Playboy or a similar magazine is eleven years. turns the other’s suffering into jouissance—with devastating consequences. and NBC. Particularly relevant to our discussion is that this instrumentalization extracts pleasure from the other’s pain.’’ of being made an instrument of the other’s jouissance. which is approximately $6.or herself.’’40 When one considers reports that more than 70 percent of the women involved in the porn industry were sexually abused as children. homes every year. jouissance has historically often manifested itself as pleasure in the other’s pain.2 billion. As we have seen. and to return to them some of the enjoyment they lost to the Other. This is what is blocked out by the culture industry’s insistence that enjoyment. it numbs us to our own suffering as well. Penthouse. particularly sexual enjoyment.41
. To explore this further. or pleasure-beyond-pleasure in regard to that subject’s relationship to him. the structure of oppression is precisely ‘‘la jouissance de l’Autre. and Playboy are distributed in U. We recall also that for Adorno. Let us consider the following: • An estimated $8–10 billion is spent annually by Americans for pornography. one must respond that there is more than one way to be made into the instrument of the other’s jouissance.

. images of women being tied up and sexually tortured are common in mainstream ﬁlms and magazines. because they are allowed to pervade our public space so thoroughly. and hard-core porn. post ofﬁces are often housed in magazine stores where customers buying stamps are faced with shelves of pornographic magazines. It is the confrontation with the images in their inevitability.’’43 For the ideology of pleasure to survive. In Japan. In every major airport porn magazines are sold alongside aspirin and souvenirs. surrounding them even when they are walking down the street or buying stamps. ‘‘candy stores’’ often display hard-core porn alongside lollipops and jelly beans. not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible. and other European countries. she will be disturbed by the inces-
. In Vienna. To strip someone forcibly of her self-image. that itself constitutes the violation. . . Adorno summarizes the degradation of pleasure in the culture industry as ‘‘to be pleased means to say Yes. . if a woman has been fortunate enough to have love and respect in her life. moreover. [T]he images are those that have been encoded as the truth of our ‘‘sex’’ in a heterosexual masculine symbolic. perhaps. it must never ‘‘leave the customer alone. Barbie magazines. is a violation. After 10:00 pm several Italian channels begin nightlong advertisements for pornography. . and Germany. magazine kiosks display pornographic magazines on street corners and subway stops. she will resist. . Austria. .’’42 Pleasure in the culture industry.’’44 The pornographic ideology will not let women imagine a different kind of sexuality for themselves. . newspaper stands sell bus tickets.208
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• In any major U. ‘‘means not to think about anything. particularly when that image is as basic as that of bodily integrity. ‘‘page 3 girls’’—appearing on pages that feature topless women—or similar phenomena are commonly found in ‘‘respectable’’ newspapers. tobacco stores line their walls with hard-core pornography.S. In Italy. [I]t is the encoding of these images. to forget suffering even when it is shown. In the United Kingdom. through their domination of public space. In the United Kingdom.45 For a while. city and almost every major European city. . As Drucilla Cornell notes. that makes them seem as if they were the truth of sex and not just one particular imaginary.

’’47 It will become easier to go numb and keep smiling as the magazine and Internet women do: ‘‘the face becomes a dead letter by freezing the most living thing about it. if only [s]he will capitulate fully and sacriﬁce his [her] claim to happiness. [objects] are made instantly accessible to an infantile grasp. in which in many countries marital rape is still not considered a crime. Adorno writes that ‘‘everyone can be happy. ﬁnally. In his essay ‘‘Sexual Taboos and the Law Today. They may never be broadened out in any way but like favourite dishes they must obey the rule of identity if they are not to be rejected as false or alien.51 Sexuality is not so much embraced by contemporary Western society as it is administered by it: ‘‘sexuality.49 In an interview with an Oxford student newspaper. namely its laughter. He and those like him are the technicians of social anesthesia.’’ Adorno mocks the particularly American conception of the ‘‘healthy sex life’’—the kind of ideological stance that Hefner typiﬁes—regarding it as a ‘‘fun morality’’ that actually hides an ever-increasing repression of sexuality. Hugh Hefner (founder of Playboy) stated that ‘‘sex is the most civilizing force on the planet.’’ The culture industry intends. no matter how sadistically motivated.
.’’ despite that society’s obsession with sexual images and discourse. dead-eyed images of what her sexual enjoyment should look like. cooperates with this process of manipulation insofar as it is absorbed. detached from thought. in a world where good American men rape an average of 1. for women to ‘‘assimilate themselves to what is dead. turned on and off.’’46 The images that women confront are all alike and all untrue: ‘‘wrenched from all context.’’50 Presumably the planet that Hefner lives on is the same one in which rape warfare has been used against women in countless conﬂicts.5 million women a year. According to Adorno. the manipulators of memory who make butchery seem a blissful dream. ‘‘[S]exual liberation in contemporary society is mere illusion.An-aesthetic Theory
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sant bombardment of the monotonous.’’48 to wrench enjoyment out of every sexual situation no matter how ambiguous. But Hugh Hefner believes in the ‘‘civilizing’’ force of ‘‘sex’’ (by which he means pornography—already a revealing metonymy) because he is an exponent of the culture industry. the modern counterparts of the doctors Pierre Flourens criticized for lying to patients about the pain of an operation. channeled and exploited in countless forms by the material and cultural industry. but the culture industry will strive to make her capitulate and thus be forced to salvage the only happiness left to her: the happiness of those resigned to their fate.

reveals a dishearteningly simplistic take on both the nature of taboo and the ‘‘nature’’ of sexuality. especially in—supposedly sex-positive (indeed. that modern society has taken what is disruptive and threatening about sexuality and domesticated it. Adorno’s ﬁrst point in ‘‘Sexual Taboos’’ is a Foucauldian one. and sexual activity involving minors. and Adorno argues that these taboos are maintained by repressed people with authoritarian tendencies. it is tolerated.54 Particularly relevant to our discussion is Adorno’s assertion that ‘‘socialized voyeurism’’ stands in for genuine sexuality today: ‘‘Contemplation by many replaces union with one and thereby expresses the tendency to socialize sexuality that itself constitutes an aspect of sexuality’s fatal integration. by contrast. sex-driven) contemporary society. is entirely in keeping with a feminist social critique.’’56 These two sentiments sound like the preamble to a dialectical critique of the contemporary sex industry.53 Adorno’s sentiment here is very close to that expressed in Roland Barthes’s essay on striptease. Adorno’s belief that there is something in sexuality that resists disciplining. As long as sexuality is bridled.’’52 Sexuality has been ‘‘desexualized’’ and ‘‘neutralized’’ even as it seems to be everywhere endorsed and exposed. where Barthes writes that public displays of sexuality can function as a kind of inoculation against the real. It is both foolish and an infringe-
. prostitution.210
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institutionalized. weaned from all personal affect. and administered by society. These taboos include pornography. something trivialized and demeaned by the crude machinations of the culture industry.’’55 Adorno further identiﬁes the speciﬁc feature upon which this sexual ideology hinges when he writes that ‘‘the desexualization of sexuality is strengthened by the premium patriarchal society places upon the female character. her passive docility. if possible from all aspiration to her own pleasure. Adorno maintains that a few sexual taboos are aggressively enforced even in—or rather. In fact. Adorno writes that ‘‘the allegedly dangerous effects of reading and viewing pornography are hypothetical. homosexuality. His contention that this undisciplined value of sexuality can somehow be found in practices considered sexually taboo by contemporary society. The ﬁrst of these is most relevant to our discussion here. Adorno goes so far in this essay as to defend the consumption of pornography and to suggest that the only real danger posed by prostitution stems from the hypocrisy of those who condemn it. threatening power of undisciplined sexuality. but ‘‘Sexual Taboos and the Law Today’’ surprisingly offers nothing of the sort.

to say nothing of ‘‘unmutilated. the Playboy founder expressed a similar sentiment when he stated that ‘‘the major problems we have on this planet have nothing to do with pictures of people fucking. cited earlier. artiﬁcial slices of female ﬂesh showcased by pornography somehow represent sex at all. breaking it does not place one on the other side of a repressive law—it places one squarely within the law itself. as in an observation that he made apropos of striptease and one that is equally applicable to pornography. and so on) often constitute an ‘‘underworld of unwritten rituals’’ in which we are libidinally invested but
. Adorno paints a picture of contemporary society in which select sexual taboos truly have the force of law. But. not. Barthes stated that ‘‘a few particles of eroticism .’’57 Adorno’s claim that ‘‘unmutilated. the argument that pornography is justiﬁable simply because some people take pleasure in it sits uneasily with Adorno’s contention. and yet accepts and defends a discourse that promotes women’s passivity and eternal sexual availability. are absorbed in a reassuring ritual which negates the ﬂesh as surely as the vaccine or the taboo circumscribe and control the illness or the crime. as is asserted. that pleasure ‘‘always means not to think about anything.’’59 The taboo is not a genuine prohibition. authentic sexual pleasure. The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation. unrepressed sex in itself does not do harm to anyone’’ is problematic for many reasons. unrepressed sex’’ is the kind of simplistic. but from the last remaining thought of resistance. to forget suffering even when it is shown. in ‘‘Sexual Taboos’’ he tries to portray the contemporary world as truly sexually repressed.’’58 The easiest way to justify the ﬂight into mindless pleasure is to insist that one is actually attempting to escape a terrible reality of repression—and though Adorno well knows how false this insistence is. supposed violations of or exceptions to the law (crime. illegal institutions. misogynist statement one expects from Hugh Hefner—and in fact. .An-aesthetic Theory
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ment upon personal liberty to withhold pornography from adults who enjoy it. not the least of which is the suggestion that pornography offers any such thing. . ﬂight from a wretched reality. The idea that the fragmented. so that transgressing these taboos means challenging social repression and opening oneself to the risks of undisciplined. But it was Adorno himself who recognized in Dialectic of Enlightenment that pleasure is a helpless ‘‘ﬂight.’’ Adorno demonstrates his awareness of sexual violence when he writes of the persecution and murder of prostitutes.’’ Second. ˇˇ As Zizek has often pointed out.

natural desires we have—an outlet characterized by picˇˇ tures of cut-up female bodies. a taboo against pornography—on its underside. with a speciﬁc form of enjoyment).’’ its built-in contradiction.212
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which also allow us to believe—insofar as we insist on their exceptional status—that we are in the main good. in his essay on sexual taboos. Adorno fails precisely to accomplish this and stumbles over his own investment in a certain aspect of cultural
.63 On one side of the law. the taboo is inherently false and serves only to justify the transgression: its ideological argument is that in a world saturated by pictures of cut-up female bodies. who expresses similar disappointment with Adorno’s discussion of homosexuality in the same essay. such as the one against pornography. However. and to overlook or minimize his heterosexism. but rather identiﬁcation with a speciﬁc form of transgression of the Law. law-abiding individuals. we are nonetheless sexually repressed and need an outlet for all the wild. writes that Adorno’s constant critique of bourgeois moralism and his ‘‘passionate stance against all oppression provide ample openings to rescue what is liberatory from his thought. The theorist who so eloquently attacked the valuation of empty pleasure seems to have fallen prey in this instance to the very illusion of ‘‘real. sexually stunted world of the law. whereas superego provides enjoyment which serves as the unacknowledged support of meaning. simpliﬁed narratives of sexuality.’’ ‘‘unmutilated’’ sexual pleasure falsely positioned as a counterpoint to the repressive. the inherent transgression that paradoxically ensures its existence.’’64 Jennifer Rycenga. the sanction of breaking this taboo. and Adorno’s failure to recognize this indicates a certain limit to his vigilance against the ‘‘logic of familiar things. One can take from Adorno’s work the urgency and value of dialectical reﬂection and critical debate of sedimented.’’62 In the case of sexual taboos. there are always two sides to the Law: the law itself and the law’s ‘‘obscene superego underside.’’61 This unacknowledged law is the law of the (obscene) superego insofar as it pertains to enjoyment: ‘‘symbolic Law guarantees meaning. decent. of the Law’s suspension (in psychoanalytic terms. especially if one does not wish to remain within a merely legalistic position.’’65 Adorno’s insistent demand for critical reﬂection of the culture industry that goes beyond merely legalistic discussions is a valuable one. As Zizek describes it.60 This ‘‘obscene underside’’ functions as an inherent transgression that binds a community together: ‘‘what ‘holds together’ a community most deeply is not so much identiﬁcation with the Law that regulates the community’s ‘normal’ everyday circuit. The two are one and the same.

56.’’ American Institute on Domestic Violence. and if such depic-
. 99. trans. Adorno. Shierry Nicholsen. Aesthetic Theory. 103. ´ 17. ‘‘Encoding. Maggie O’Neill (London: Sage. 45. Aesthetic Theory. 70. 218. Culture. 2. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 10. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. 1999). 311. Mass. Aesthetic Theory. Adorno and Horkheimer. 1999). 144. Theodor Adorno. ‘‘Adorno. Playboy. Adorno. 3. ´ 18.
Notes
1. and Feminism. and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey. 20. Lopez. and the Aura: An Aesthetics for Photography.htm (accessed 14 August 2004). November 1998. Adorno.’’ 57. 1996). Adorno. http://www. cited in Lopez. 13.: MIT Press). Benjamin was particularly concerned about its potential to reinstate a kind of degraded aura. 218. 12. Robert Hullot-Kentor (New York: Continuum. Incidence. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Dialectic of Enlightenment.org/resources/ facts. trans. NIJ and CDC. 1997). ‘‘Encoding. Culture. ‘‘Encoding. Graphic depictions of sexuality are not in themselves pornographic. Kaja Silverman. Silvia Lopez. 5. ed.’’ 69. Aesthetic Theory. 14. Dialectic of Enlightenment.66 There is much work to be done to expand Adorno’s brilliant aesthetic vision in a direction that he himself could not or was not willing to take.’’ in Adorno. 1995). ´ 9. ‘‘Domestic Violence Statistics. Prevalence. ´ 7. John Cumming (New York: Continuum. Adorno and Horkheimer. 4. ed. It is nonetheless possible to draw from Adorno’s theory a critique of the culture industry’s anesthetic representations of female sexuality. Benjamin.’’ in Adorno. and Penthouse. American Institute on Domestic Violence.com/Statistics. Available at http://endabuse. Quoted in Nicholsen. 6. a term I have always found misleading. Lopez. Adorno.aidv-usa. 21. and the Aura.’’ 69. ‘‘The Encoding of History: Thinking Art in Constellations. especially The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge. Aesthetic Theory.An-aesthetic Theory
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ideology. 151 11. Adorno and Horkheimer. 13. I do not address here homosexual pornography or so-called feminist pornography. At the Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge. I use the word pornography throughout this chapter to designate mainstream heterosexist visual pornography. Aesthetic Theory. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Aesthetic Theory.’’ 68. 1996). 56.’’ 69. Maggie O’Neill (London: Sage. Adorno. and perhaps even to develop an aesthetic of female sexuality that might counter it. cited in Lopez. Feminism. ‘‘Encoding. 15. 8. Benjamin. exempliﬁed by magazines such as Hustler. a cultic value—see the work of Susan Buck-Morss. ‘‘Adorno. Quoted in Geoffrey Hartmann. National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ´ 19. 22. 16.

00. M. Nicholsen. 35. ‘‘Adorno.’’ in Adorno. director. 45. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 36.’’ and attempt to subvert or challenge the commodiﬁcation of women’s bodies and the mythiﬁcation of her supposed ‘‘pleasure. 73–81.womenofsubstance.’’ 153.’’ Guardian Unlimited. I suggest that the way it could be condensed into a speciﬁc image—that of women covered head to foot by burkas—affected American sensibilities in way that the mental image of rape and torture of women could and did not. See MacKinnon. 31. Adorno and Horkheimer. Larry Flynt’s daughter.’’ I fail to see the accuracy or usefulness of calling them pornographic.co. Amnesty International. ed. Katharine Viner.uk/comment/story/0.
. Maggie O’Neill (London: Sage.’’ San Francisco Chronicle.214
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tions are truly ‘‘feminist. The Imaginary Domain: Abortion. 33. J. 1999). Raw Deal: A Question of Consent (Spellman/Corben Productions. These were the same jehadin with whom the United States allied itself to oust the Taliban.’’ Worldnet Daily. Adorno.worldnetdaily. 252. for example. ‘‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide. ‘‘Turning Rape into Pornography.com/news/article. Drucilla Cornell.com/cgibin/article. 43. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 144. See. 230.’’ 57. ‘‘Adorno. Sherrie Gossett. 24. Benjamin. and Sexual Harassment (New York. has alleged that her father sexually abused her as a child. ‘‘Pornography Facts. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 55–56. 41. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 42. ‘‘The Sexual Sadism of Our Culture. 27. 2001). Adorno and Horkheimer. 144. Catharine A. Adorno and Horkheimer. 74.. Alexandra Stiglmayer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Tonya Flynt-Vega. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Slavoj Zizek. and Horkheimer. And this is perhaps the key to understanding why one of the only instances of America’s explicit condemnation of violence against women concerned the Taliban’s regime.’’ 30. 25.guardian.’’ http://www. reports by Human Rights Watch. Juliet Flower MacCannell. http://www. Culture. 112. MacKinnon. ed. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 153. ˇˇ 39. Bernstein (London: Routledge 1991). 1998). Susan J. ed.asp?ARTICLE_ID 38335 (accessed 15 August 2004).S. Pornography. Billy Corben. The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso. 29. http:// www. 44. 141.cgi?f /c/a/2004/07/25/CMGF77DFKC1. and the U. 148. 47. Adorno and Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. the United Nations. Adorno and Horkheimer.htm (accessed 15 August 2004). 26. Adorno. 40. 147. 1997). 32.: Westminster John Knox Press. Ky. in Peace and in War. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 34.1222354. and not that of the warring factions in power in Afghanistan before and after it: prior to the Taliban takeover. Adorno and Horkheimer.org/por. 251.DTL (accessed 14 August 2004).html (accessed 15 August 2004). Adorno and Horkheimer.’’ in Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 1995). While I in no way wish to downplay the Taliban’s oppression of women. See her book Hustled: My Journey from Fear to Faith (Louisville. Brison. ‘‘Bogus GI Rape Photos Used as Arab Propaganda. 151. 1994). 38. http://sfgate. 28. Department of Justice. Routledge. Adorno and Horkheimer. ‘‘The Torture Connection. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 37. and who continue to practice sexual violence against women today. MacCannell. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. and the Aura. the jehadin were notorious for their campaigns of rape and torture. and Feminism. 46. ‘‘Adorno: The Riddle of Femininity. 23.

72.’’ Cherwell. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as Political Factor (London: Verso. Adorno. 1998). 57. 75. Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso. In my view. Adorno. Adorno and Horkheimer. 75. 65. Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press. emphasis added. 101. 66. The Invisible Master. 54. 1996). 51. Slavoj Zizek. 2002). 85–86. 36. or. 1994) 55. Critical Models. Culture Industry.
. Adorno. ˇˇ 63. is seen by the liberal West as a barbaric. Adorno.’’ in A Barthes Reader. ‘‘Oldest Swinger in Town. Zizek.’’ in Gaze and Voice as ˇˇ Love Objects. performed without anesthesia and using primitive tools such as glass and razors. 52. It is interesting to note how the practice of female genital mutilation (fgm) in African and Middle Eastern countries. ed. ˇˇ 62. ‘‘ ‘I Hear You with My Eyes. Hugh Hefner interview with Andrew Morris. Adorno.An-aesthetic Theory
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48. 82. 16–17. 59. 81. ˇˇ 60. 144. emphasis added. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell. is commonly accepted as women’s natural attempts to ‘‘improve’’ themselves. ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang.’’ see Slavoj ˇˇ Zizek. Jennifer Rycenga.’’ in Adorno: A Critical Reader. 56. 2002). For a further critique of Adorno’s conception of the ‘‘authoritarian personality.’’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Barthes. 49. 64. trans. Critical Models.’ ’’ 101. ed. 73. Critical Models. while the practice of breast-enlargement surgery and ‘‘genital landscaping. 50. Zizek. Adorno. Roland Barthes. Adorno. Critical Models. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Slavoj Zizek. 55. ‘‘ ‘I Hear You with My Eyes’. 58. 56. 1996). ‘‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today. ˇˇ 61. Metastases.’’ performed under anesthetic in modern hospitals. 1998). one of the most exciting approaches to the possibility of this aesthetic can be found in Kaja Silverman’s At the Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge. ‘‘Striptease. 18 May 2001. 53. Critical Models. patriarchal intervention in women’s bodies to force them to conform to male standards of beauty and sexuality. 73. ‘‘Queerly Amiss: Sexuality and the Logic of Adorno’s Dialectics. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press.

.

There has been a very visible backlash in the United States against what some identify as ‘‘victim feminism. and delimit the terms on which pain and suffering are real to the women who experience them and suggest a limited responsibility on the part of the social world.’’ much of which focuses on those feminist efforts that attend to sexual violence. I am quite convinced that it is only through public struggles over the terms on which sexuality will be lived in private that women can become
. as they trivialize.1 I am not interested in engaging with these arguments.10
Living with Negative Dialectics
Feminism and the Politics of Suffering
´ Renee Heberle
Feminism encourages the public expression of gendered and sexual oppression and suffering to accomplish the ends of recognition and justice. dismiss.

along with other critical thinkers. present memory of suffering as a means by which to prevent its repetition is. Rather than engage the current status of the discourse and activism about feminism and suffering on these terms. Adorno (in)famously wrote that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. autonomy. of course. I take it up in the spirit in which I think Theodor Adorno would encourage us to take up the entanglements and complexities of seeking recognition and justice in conditions of late modernity. social. he lived and thought through his awareness of his survivor guilt as a Jew for whom accident of birth and circumstances of life allowed escape from Hitler’s ovens. Thinking in modernity is inevitably circumscribed by identitarian categories and instrumental reason. but as an extension of the logic of modern instrumental reason and exchange relations naturalized through capitalist relations of production and distribution. He felt his complicity with and embeddedness in the lived realities that made the Holocaust possible in such a fashion that the very form and substance of his philosophy should be read as a response. but perhaps not really. albeit in the context of political systems that can be loosely described as liberal democratic. treacherous. understands the Final Solution not as a mistake or barbaric regression to premodern reactions to perceived threats.218
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free from gendered and sexual coercion and violence.’’ More to the point. It is this that has led to his reputation as a pessimist with respect to the potential for constructing a better future. Creating a living. Informed by a strong Nietzschean impulse. attachments to suffering. These systems ﬂourish. that Adorno. Adorno articulated as a categorical imperative of the post-Auschwitz world that we must live in such a way as to never allow anything like the Holocaust to happen again. Adorno never claimed to escape this form of thinking. when he writes at the end
. Adorno was profoundly concerned that we remember suffering in such a way that does not render justice (or the struggle for justice) contingent upon the ownership of suffering. Adorno argues that resistance to domination and oppression is not in itself a moment of freedom. thus. He later softens this claim. He ‘‘lived with the guilt of what he was thinking. The contradiction persists that within liberal democratic society. or static meanings of suffering. or agency. Nor does the accomplishment of recognition through collectivizing experience necessarily signal progress. The difﬁculty is. these systems insistently cultivate political. and cultural relations of domination that systematically obscure and deny the potential to create the conditions of freedom.

hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.Living with Negative Dialectics
219
of Negative Dialectics: ‘‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream. without which there could have been no Auschwitz. there are moments wherein a sensitivity to a kind of survivor guilt becomes clear. may go on living. However. He recognized his embeddedness as a subject in the very form of thinking that he argued made the Holocaust possible. that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary. even less can the fallible need. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident. However. predation. exploitation. and suffering is so common and apparently systematic. To survive after Auschwitz calls for the ‘‘coldness.’’ We also see the impulse in the self-consciousness within feminism and feminist movements about privilege among and difference between women. It may be a prerequisite of knowing
. subjective experiences. one who by rights should have been killed. and of the gradual erosion of the signiﬁcance of the particular as abstract identitarian principles come to govern the most private. such as in the unwillingness to elaborate successful resistance to attempted rape in the context of speak-outs or public discourse about rape because of sensitivity toward women who did not ‘‘successfully resist. It signiﬁes the lack of control the individual has over the objective world. Like many feminists. this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity. Suffering does not speak easily in the public domain. however desperate. interior. It is this sensibility that Adorno’s work often captures. Survivor guilt is not part of what women and feminists should experience. of embeddedness in one’s historical context. Adorno shares with feminism a desire to theorize from the concrete rather than deduce facts from general principles. the felt experience of that lack often translates as a productive form of guilt. even in a world wherein sexual violence. an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier’’ (363). By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all.’’2 Adorno said he was enmeshed in the guilt of what he was thinking as an intellectual in the post-Holocaust age. The vigilance this experience calls for and the form of critical theory such awareness adopts is negative dialectics. point the direction of the answer’’ (212). Adorno says. he is sensitive to the issues of difference. ‘‘A question’s urgency cannot compel an answer if no true answer is obtainable.

There is always already something not heard. is never adequate. ‘‘The power of the status quo puts up the facades into which our consciousness crashes. Surviving in such resistance is the speculative moment: what will not have its law prescribed for it by given facts transcends them even in the closest contact with the objects. and in repudiating a sacrosanct transcendence. we cannot speak it or know it without doing damage to a qualitative difference between experience and that which it is possible to communicate. As have some feminisms. It must seek to crash through them. Where the thought transcends the bonds it tied in resistance—there is its freedom’’ (17). It forces nonidentitarian moments into interchangeable relationships with other objects in the service of explanation and regulation. Meanwhile. yet the human condition is nonetheless deﬁned by concepts and categories. its expression. Modern ideologies of the individual and the authenticity of subjective knowledge deny or obscure the
. Enlightenment epistemologies and social expectations demand that moments of suffering be transparently knowable. if possible— whereas at present each communicative step is falsifying truth and selling it out. Adorno is thinking here about the articulation of suffering as a subversive moment.220
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truth that we recognize and somehow ﬁnd space for the need. which is what occurs when we lend it a voice that communicates in the public domain. This is precisely why politics is not about truth. Adorno understood that the quality of human experience is irreducible to concepts and categories. The object never goes into its concept without remainder. its most subjective experience. He goes on to say that ‘‘freedom follows the subject’s urge to express itself. We must resist the all but universal compulsion to confuse the communication of knowledge with knowledge itself. though we may imagine a truth that haunts politics. in the conceptualization of suffering. They are what we can know. not rendered. The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. This alone would free the postulate of depth from ideology. while the excess that haunts all conceptualization makes it impossible to reach the truth through expression. but the conceptualization of suffering. desire—that which would not otherwise naturally have an identity in the social world—comes to be identiﬁed. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject. and to rate it higher. The irrational. Adorno writes: ‘‘Direct communication to everyone is not a criterion of truth. whatever has to do with language suffers of this paradoxicality’’ (41). is objectively conveyed’’ (17– 18).

the experiential. For Adorno. The dialectics of this process. rather. He argues in a lecture titled ‘‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’’ that Hegel understood ‘‘that the limits of knowledge to which its critical self-reﬂection leads are not something external to knowledge. Relations of domination between the self and what is other never quite absorb the excess of what is other. the immediate datum eludes subjectivity. ‘‘Spontaneity of experience is neither continuously maintainable nor downright positive. the logical universality that governs his thinking. hence. as the school of Durkheim in particular has shown. the negative dialectics. the truth is not there. through the determinate negation of positive forms of knowing otherness. they are inherent in all moments of knowledge. This remainder sustains the possibility for critique and for change from a world whose dominant epistemologies and social forms encourage projects that privilege the subject as knower and thus a rigid separation between self and other.Living with Negative Dialectics
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critical limits of the integrative forms of representation and communication available to the subject at any given time. its increasingly mediated quality in modernity.’’3 It is thus through immanent critique. and the inarticulable not as ‘‘authentic’’ or prior to discourse and engagement in the political world. and that our efforts to represent experience are always already political. Adorno argues for an approach to experience and the political through the elusive quality of experience. In fact. His is a limit philosophy of knowledge. not something to which it is merely condemned from the outside. we can suggest alternative ways of knowing otherness in the world.’’4 He set up the terms on which we may remember the historicity of experience and its link to memory. Adorno discusses the individual as constituted by the social world: ‘‘Not only does the bearer of personal consciousness owe his existence and the reproduction of his life to society. and expression as we engage. through awareness of the inherent limits of knowledge. In his lecture. is. but rather as what haunts action. Through critique. we are embedded in our social context through which our sense of self is continually being constructed. that we sustain critique in an as yet unreconciled world. everything through which he is speciﬁcally constituted as a cognitive subject. It is this that I ﬁnd valuable for a feminism that privileges the concrete. speech. that is. something not covered by the concept. and without mapping out or presuming to plan the outcomes. always also social in nature. The most subjective.’’5 He goes on: ‘‘A mode of thinking that understands the individual as zoon politikon and the categories of subjective consciousness as implicitly social
. leave a remainder.

even involuntarily. We can thus think of experience as a prism through which we interpret the world. This relationship is our experience and in itself constitutes objects for interpretation by ourselves and others. the quality of our experience changes over time. Our relationship to otherness then becomes an object of interpretation.’’6 Adhering to the tradition of materialist philosophy. with the totalities that experience confronts. The story becomes embedded in their lives. the storyteller and his or her audience interact. Storytelling engages the audience in an active contemplation of the world. As with painting. it is the latter that is elicited. The reconstruction of experience as information eliminates that part of com-
. which subsequently creates a living relationship between the audience and the painting.222
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will no longer cling to a notion of experience that hypostatizes the individual. Adorno’s discussion of experience is complicated by history. ‘‘The Storyteller’’ and ‘‘Some Motifs on Baudelaire. The pattern of reﬂection is mediated by a dynamic totality and by parts of our lives and the lives of others to which we have no immediate cognitive access. Benjamin refers speciﬁcally to the quality of experience in modernity in two essays. The auratic quality of the experience related through the art of storytelling survives through the contemplative relationship the audience develops to the story. which entails the looking back and forth of the painter and the painted. It refers back to Benjamin’s ideas about experience. In storytelling. It may be the simplicity of the story. Adorno believes that it is in the sensuous world that we create knowledge. gathering meanings. that we become cognitive subjects. the ‘‘dryness’’ of its terms and its lack of explanation that makes it live on historically. Experience’s advance to consciousness of its interdependence with the experience of all human beings acts as a retroactive correction to its starting point in mere individual experience. rather than merely ‘‘jostling the consciousness’’ temporarily as pieces of information. Ehrfarung. and the experience that develops meaning through the remembrance and the passing on or communicating of experience over time.’’7 These essays articulate the difference between the knowledge of experience elicited through information. Erlebnis. The notion of experience in the name of which Adorno mobilizes remembrance is not measurable or easily described. as it has been in the life of the storyteller. Walter Benjamin had a profound and lasting inﬂuence on Adorno’s understanding of the changing quality of experience in late modernity.

but of time and attitude. the harder it is to see. Benjamin’s storyteller only knows experience as always already past. Adorno’s theory allows for a sustained engagement with the world in experience. of the witnessing of history ‘‘at a standstill’’ in the object.
. though aesthetically styled. not in a dialectical movement in which subject and object are necessarily interactive. As it is told. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle ﬂame of his story. that which attempts to bring experiences of others close to the listener or reader through explanation. in the sense not of objectivity or disinterestedness. This is why Benjamin. However. Information. Like the wick of the storyteller’s life that is a source of wisdom. easily replaced. never in its lived moments. His thinking is reminiscent of that in Nietzsche’s preface to the Genealogy of Morals (1967) wherein Nietzsche speaks of experience as a vanishing point to which we persistently refer while rubbing our ears after the bell tolls and wondering what it was that just happened. experience can only be known in retrospect.’’8 Experience evaporates upon contact with deliberative consciousness. making it instrumentally available to everyone while reducing its meaning to a brief shock effect. fails to enter it into the life of the listener as anything but a passing moment. distance. The dialectical images of Benjamin’s theory of experience become still and then consumed as they are known in the contemplative life of the knower. privileges the storyteller and the ﬂaneur over the man of the masses. allowing it to live. contemplative distance to the object that allows the experience of aura. History becomes a series of images seen only in retrospect. existence with the otherness of experience in the world. to be able to tell his entire life. For Benjamin it is the unapproachability of experience that sustains its nonidentity. is the key to understanding. Experience is only tellable in retrospect. This is the basis of the incomparable aura about the storyteller. in this essay. In ‘‘The Storyteller’’ Benjamin writes of the consuming ﬂame of the story. Adorno’s ideas about experience encourage an intensely political. ‘‘His gift is the ability to relate his life. These characters sustain a kind of relaxed.Living with Negative Dialectics
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munication. destroys the auratic content of the experience. Adorno sustained the argument about the quality of distance that Benjamin said offered access to the aura of the object. his distinction. As it is known it is consumed. The closer one is. the life of the teller—he or she whose experience is being told—becomes remembered only through the terms of the story.

He said that the individual’s capacity to be discriminating in his or her experience of the object rather than objectifying it through grand systems was present in early capitalism. immanent in historical movement. . He argues that nineteenth-century bourgeois individualism weakened the objectifying power of knowledge. it would be ﬂatly incomprehensible that a subject can know an object.’’ In other words. found things immanent in the quality of individuality in the nineteenth century that sustained nonidentity. however. Calvin Thomas persuasively argues that Adorno argues not for a ‘‘going back to.’’ but rather for a resuscitation of. If this moment were extinguished altogether.224
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Adorno. contributing to the subversion of grandly oppressive systems theories of philosophy and science that privilege the objectiﬁcation of the world in explanation as a path to knowledge. In ‘‘A Knowledge That Would Not Be Power: Adorno. he engages it for purposes of critique rather than engaging himself in an empty yearning for times gone by. on terms immanent to historical experience in capitalist society. which never fully disappears. Adorno explains the dialectical.’’9 The concept of discrimination is a complex blending of a secularized mimetic element of intuition with the modern rational approach to knowing the object. even in late capitalism. It strengthened the individual’s capacity to be discriminating in his or her experience of the object. . In being secularized. Adorno looks to the nineteenth century to show how the potential for nonidentity. This is not an afﬁrmation or uncritical celebration of nineteenthcentury individualism. In other words. The word for this process is discrimination. The longing for nonidentity. the mimetic element in turn blends with the rational one. devoid of all afﬁnity. is continually extinguished by encroaching instrumental reason. individuality in the nineteenth century contained moments of resistance to the encroaching instrumental forces of enlightenment. . and the Musical Subject. experience that is always already there. there survives a groping for the concordance which the magical delusion used to place beyond doubt. it is an effort to redeem nonidentity.’’ Thomas argues that Adorno ‘‘mobilizes nostalgia. Nostalgia. negative effects of this discrimination: ‘‘Even in the conception of rational knowledge. Thomas wonders how accusations that Adorno engaged in an elitist form of nostalgia for a protected bourgeois past could hold when Adorno’s life work was consumed with critiquing
. the unleashed rationality would be irrational. of the ‘‘groping for the concordance which the magical delusion used to place beyond doubt’’ continues. even in the age of organization. like Benjamin.

constitutes a political relationship with experience playing a critical role. but through an elective afﬁnity to otherness. is not a conservation of the past but a move to redeem the hopes of the past. thus experiential cognition is itself an interpretive process. ‘‘Experience forbids the resolution in the unity of consciousness of whatever appears contradictory. This offers a sense of familiarity with the object.’’11 It is not through the totalizing and distancing effects of objectivism. For instance.’’10 Thomas goes on to argue that Adorno was attempting to reactivate a capacity to hear.’ the deﬁnition forced upon him by society when he would make his living—such a contradiction cannot be brought under any unity without manipulation. prior to engagement. is not for a lost object but rather for a lost possibility. or through knowledge stimulated by reliance on subjectivity and identity
. Our experience is not transparent to us but always subject to interpretation. Thomas argues: ‘‘Adorno’s nostalgia . as ethically relevant or as truthtelling in itself. It is through this relationship of elective afﬁnity that we might know otherness in a manner that sustains connection without erasing difference. even if the familiarity is bred from our prior awareness that something is strange or alien as opposed to normal and close. to experience. idealist philosophy creates abstract forms in the name of truthtelling. Rather. our access to the object. a contradiction like the one between the deﬁnition which an individual knows as his own and his ‘role. I am not referring to the sensibility with which most feminists approach experience. to know not through abstract concepts or totalizing knowledge. or historical meaning. without the insertion of some wretched cover concepts that will make the crucial differences vanish. In denying manysidedness. It signiﬁes a will to identify ﬁrst and engage only after the cognitive relationship is in place. This process of constructing knowledge. I am thinking of experience in its role as a critical check on Enlightenment forms of knowledge. Adorno does not favor a regression but calls for the reactivation of a fundamental human capacity—a capacity without which the word ‘human’ in the sense not of ‘humanist’ but of ‘humane’ could hardly apply: the capacity to suffer and to recognize the suffering of others. to be in a relation of mimesis to the suffering other and the suffering in ourselves. In using the word critical. This afﬁrms. .Living with Negative Dialectics
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the regression to or fetishization of any historical moment or theory of days gone by. Enlightenment knowledges deny the many-sidedness of any object and force the object into dimensions of total visibility. .

For Adorno. in experiencing the other one must yield to the other without losing one’s sense of self. how is the relationship nonhierarchical? ‘‘By primacy of the object is meant that the subject. The subject cannot be without the object. in a sense more radical than the object. as being biased itself. the subject must see its own power enough to yield to the object without fear of selfannihilation.226
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that we will come to live in peace with otherness. ‘‘The objective content of individual experience is not produced by the method of comparative generalization. He places the subject and object in an asymmetrical. while the object can be (but not be known) without the subject or the subjective element. on the strength of its own objective being. It must see that a dominative relationship to the object is not necessary for it to exert itself in the world. one allowing for the constitutive nature of the object. not weakness. and reﬂexive process of understanding that is receptive of the experience of otherness. Only then can one know the other in such a way as to resist the dominative relationship that comes with positivist or idealist forms of knowledge that demand that the knowing subject wrap its mind around the known object or the other and assume total knowledge. This ‘‘coming to know’’ implies an endless. which is not known otherwise than through consciousness. Adorno limits the conception of the subject through theorizing the primacy of the object. He argues that it is in the cognitive relationship to experience as an object that the subject can do this. including the otherness within ourselves. not more re-
. for its part an object in a qualitatively different sense. But his understanding is more complex than either of those familiar phrases imply. It is through a complex process of recognition. It is asymmetrical because the subject is objectiﬁed in thought in a radically different way from how the subject knows the object.’’13 This is Adorno’s version of what others have called unity in diversity or the problem of sustaining autonomy within a community of solidarity. iterative. it is produced by dissolving what keeps that experience. Rather. this subject/knower is more powerful. If Adorno argues that the subject is a thing of the world and for the primacy of the object. nonhierarchical relationship that recognizes the constitutive nature of the object without eradicating the subject. is as an object also a subject. that we might come to know ourselves and others. from yielding to the object without reservation—as Hegel put it: with the freedom that would relax the cognitive subject until it truly fades into the object to which it is akin.’’12 The subject must see power in its object status. without objectiﬁcation. For Adorno.

For there could no more be truth without a subject freeing itself from delusions than there could be truth without that which is not the subject. to what he called dialectical images. ‘‘As for the privileged character which rancor holds against it.’’14 For Adorno. ‘‘Benjamin’s images functioned like switches. representative. Benjamin juxtaposes the constructed perspectives of many different. this subject would recognize that it too is an object of knowledge to the other. It can do this only where. the experiences
. shocking through to a standstill and setting the reiﬁed objects in motion by causing them to lose their secondnature familiarity. but how truths that always already exist for us in the social world can be unlocked through constellations and how that interpretation can be transformed into new social meanings. historical ﬁgures such as the ﬂaneur (made famous by Baudelaire) the whore and the street sweeper. Benjamin inﬂuences Adorno. this fact has consequences for the relation of theory and practice. and the element of truth in reity—these two extremes touch in the idea of truth.Living with Negative Dialectics
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signed. not its constituent. which a subjective metaphysical experience will not be talked out of. fearlessly passive. arresting the ﬂeeting phenomena and starting thought in motion or.’’16 Truths. In addition. We should always already be vulnerable to being seen and transformed in relationships to others. alternately. the critical issue is not who or which social identity can know truth. ‘‘Approaching knowledge of the object is the act in which the subject rends the veil it is weaving around the object. as the cognitive relationship between the subject and the object. is critical to Benjamin’s method of knowing within the conditions of modernity. as if one were shocking oneself into a realization about an object. that in which truth has its archetype. in its contingency. truth will lose that character when men stop pleading the experiences they owe it to—when they let it enter instead into conﬁgurations and causal contexts that help to make it evident or to convict it of its failings. the primacy of the object is shimmering through—whatever is in the object is not a subjective admixture. The subject is the object’s agent. ‘‘Yet the surplus over the subject.’’15 Adorno makes clear that truths exist in the world and affect it materially but cannot represent it totally. The element of surprise. encouraging him to see the importance of the idiosyncratic and the unexpected aspects of the object through the process of interpretation. are in ﬂux and are permeable. In places where subjective reason scents subjective contingency. it entrusts itself to its own experience.’’17 But remember that for Benjamin.

and much of critical theory. the function of riddle-solving is to light up the riddle—Gestalt like lightning and to negate it (aufzuheben). which can be placed in relationship to an object in order to center it and illuminate its contradictory positioning in a world characterized by reiﬁcation. ‘‘Authentic philosophic interpretation does not meet up with a ﬁxed meaning which already lies behind the question. Persistent critique of the limits of one’s own cognition may keep the moment of objectiﬁcation temporary while sustaining the distance that defeats the smothering requirements of sameness. for feminism has been recognized with respect to concerns about the relationship between women’s oppression and the domination of nature.’’19 What is it in Adorno’s theory that I would argue contributes to a feminist politics? The relevance of Adorno’s work.’’18 Adorno argues that as cognitive subjects. the exchange principle. resistance to the integrative forces of the world requires distance between self and object or other.228
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elicited through this were consumed in the telling. Adorno understands concepts as historical images. acts mistakenly like someone who wants to ﬁnd in the riddle the reﬂection of a being which lies behind it. not to persist behind the riddle and imitate it. but only as the past. which implies that as subjects we can remove the moment of mediation from our relationship to others. in which it is contained. It will help us avoid the reiﬁcation of difference as merely the ﬂip side of identity or as a generic space between self-contained identities. For Adorno. and consumes it at the same time. a being mirrored in the riddle. This is not a distance of disinterested objectivity. They identify the experience being told through the process of the story. Instead. that traditional means of knowing disregard as a burden or as insigniﬁcant to the conclusions the knower is obliged to reach. and identity thinking. reconstituting it. but lights it up suddenly and momentarily. Modern Western thought consistently
. we must live in the tensionﬁlled spaces at the edges of our particular being in order to live in freedom with others. Adorno’s thinking functions more like a cipher than a diagnosis: ‘‘He who interprets by searching behind the phenomenal world for a world-in-itself which forms its foundation and support. of the other. They could not live in the present. produced by human beings. Feminists have shown in many different ways how the repression of ‘‘woman’’ and the ‘‘feminine’’ represents the denial of nature and the catastrophe of historical progress. It is a distance encouraged by the method of knowing in constellations that perpetually illuminate those sides of the object.

as do many Hegelian-Marxian theories of history. It is nonidentical with its objects. natural. In that tradition. while as subjects we cannot willfully step outside the terms of its logic.Living with Negative Dialectics
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looks to woman as representative of what is necessarily private. Adorno argues that the persistence of the dialectic. It remains in a state of antagonism with its own terms of existence. totality is not ﬁnal. women only become historical actors if and when they enter the sphere of public production. It is not a self-contained apparatus operating out of the reach of individuals. I argue. is used consistently across his works. his critical theory of totality in modernity as legislated by Reason and identity logic is relevant to feminists concerned with politicizing sexuality in a world apparently fragmented and contingent. yet thoroughly suffused with relations of domination and power. including experience. For Adorno. Post-Marxist critical theory calls attention to the crises of modern subjectivity. The Hegelian-Marxian tradition has been shown to be no less biased in its perspectives on public and private lives and the contribution of each to history. deﬁes closure in identity. However. Thus. to make them visible and thus to denaturalize the givenness or commonsense status of subject/object. there is nothing speciﬁc to gendered lives having anything to do with historical change. it contributes to challenges to the notion of the uniﬁed Subject of history and examines the egocentric identity development of the individual as always interrupted by that which is inaccessible to instrumental reason. it is difﬁcult to argue that any concept. Through these theoretical moves. we can potentially subvert its terms where its limits become identiﬁed as such through interpretation of experience. challenging the concept of Reason as an emancipatory tool of conquest over necessity by a uniﬁed. I attempt to advance these important insights with an inquiry into how Adorno might be relevant to urgent questions raised in contemporary feminist theory and politics about sexual identity and suffering. Rather than assuming the suffering of nature as a residual effect of historical progress. This is where experience and the constellatory quality of Adorno’s thought precludes reductionist causal or structural analysis in interpreting the meaning of experience. self/other relations of dominance. Feminist thought has been emerging and expands only through en-
. the domination of nature in history. self-knowing subject. The project of critique is to bear witness to its boundaries. human/nature. Adorno’s work did not develop in a linear fashion. and prerational. There is always a constitutive outside to any system.

8. 152. 10. ‘‘Subject and Object. Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum Press. Theodor Adorno. 164). 7. 13. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge. Brown.: MIT Press. Adorno. Hegel. Fear. will. Sex. be sustained between the truth and politics. ‘‘A Knowledge That Would Not Be Power: Adorno. for example. ‘‘Subject and Object. Theodor Adorno.
. ed.
Notes
1. Adorno. 1988).’’ 506. and Feminism on Campus (New York: Little. 2. Illuminations. and the Musical Subject. 1993). Benjamin. Lending the experience of suffering a voice is a condition of truth and is an imperative if we are to aspire to live in a world free of suffering. 502. Calvin Thomas. Negative Dialectics.230
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gagement with internal differences between women and constant and often conﬂictual self-questioning. Negative Dialectics. Theodor Adorno. not a separation. Adorno. 63. 11. Negative Dialectics. 9. Mass. 1987). Walter Benjamin. ‘‘Subject and Object. Adorno.’’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Adorno. Adorno.’’ 506. 16.’’ New German Critique 48 (1989): 163. trans. He prefers that a respectful distance. 4. that experience in itself is subject to interpretation and will take on life beyond the intention. Adorno. 1993). Hegel: Three Studies. 109. 3. 42. 15. We can take this imperative in a direction that does not lead us into the aporias of identity thinking through looking again at Adorno’s theory of experience and negative dialectics. 1994). 6. However. This should not be thought about with dismay or resignation. Hegel. Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon and Schuster. Nostalgia. 363. 5. 375. and Christina Hoff Summers. 39–40. Illuminations. Negative Dialectics. but with an eye toward proliferating the possibilities of resistance that can be seen only simultaneously by keeping an eye on the horizon of freedom. See. eds. Negative Dialectics. or control of the teller as he or she moves on and the world moves on. 12. Katie Roiphie. Adorno. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum Press. Feminist theory remains critical because it is situationally grounded and contextual. 94. Adorno. Hannah Arendt (New York: Random House. Further page references are cited parenthetically in the text. 14. 45. 76–77. Suffering does not speak easily and does not reveal truth in the public space of politics.

Adorno’s meager hopes for political resistance were pinned. ‘‘Something is provided for all.
´ I am grateful to Renee Heberle.’’ he wrote concerning the culture industry.11
Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
Paul Apostolidis
The grim. and Judith Grant for their generous and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. the ineluctability of incorporation into the self-perpetuating rituals of social domination was not only the modus operandi of the culture industry but also the hallmark of life as such under late capitalism. foreboding vision of a seamlessly ‘‘administrated world’’ haunts the critical theory of Theodor Adorno. For Adorno.
. Lisa Disch. so that none may escape. accordingly.

general concepts. Adorno argued for a form of critical reason that prioritized the subject’s unrelenting vigilance of its own tendency to assimilate the object’s concrete. It also takes us some distance toward a rapprochement between early critical theory. Adorno evinced little recognition of the injustices of exclusion. Solidarity with the victims of injustice could only be expressed indirectly. through aesthetic creation and criticism as such rather than through political communication and mobilization.
. While not seeking to justify the gaps and crude overgeneralizations of Adorno’s social theory. and mobilizing collective action to make society more inclusive. with its notorious blind spots regarding women. without forcing individual idiosyncrasies and particular experiences into hiding. particular characteristics to abstract. the gender-speciﬁc modes of consumerism generated by the culture industry. Yet a theory of democratic inclusion responsive to feminist concerns still can beneﬁt from a reconsideration of Adorno. economic. Nor was he particularly attuned to the varying patterns of inclusion within social processes that made women’s experiences of domination different from those of men—for instance. a retrospective glance at Adorno leads us to some important qualiﬁcations of Young’s theory. and cultural institutions. This theory of negative dialectics—extended beyond the realm of individual consciousness and considered as a criterion and practice of intersubjective relations—can illuminate certain vital features of a democratic communication that is inclusive without suppressing particularity. we can turn to Adorno for philosophical reinforcement in facing one of the main challenges for a democratic theory of deliberation: imagining how to expand the scope of meaningful and effective participation in democratic processes. How contrary in ethos seem the concerns of feminist thinkers and activists who have waged battles attacking the systematic exclusion of women from positions of power in major political. Envisioning precisely this sort of communication is the core problematic of Iris Marion Young’s theory of inclusive democracy. As we shall see.234
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on necessarily lonely acts of resistance by deﬁant intellectuals and inscrutable works of art. Preoccupied with the ways in which individuals’ absorption into the ‘‘bad totality’’ of modern capitalism made a mockery of critical subjectivity. and contemporary critical theory that self-consciously bears the profound inﬂuence of feminist thought.

People who are familiar with those contexts and have been educated in how to follow those norms thus have a clear advantage in public deliberations.’’ which she deﬁnes in this way: ‘‘Though formally included in a forum or process. she argues. democracy requires the public to determine which proposals ‘‘are supported by the best reasons’’? Young answers this question by pointing to the problem of ‘‘internal exclusion.’’2 She faults other theories of deliberative democracy.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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Young’s Theory of Inclusive Communication
In Inclusion and Democracy. when. Rather. Young provides a critical alternative to theories of deliberative democracy. but by determining which proposals the collective agrees are supported by the best reasons. however. theories of democracy that make citizenship coextensive with voting. among which lies the tendency unduly to privilege argument over other forms of communication. and other self-interested actions leave a number of tasks unfulﬁlled. These especially include inquiring into the origins of individual preferences rather than taking them as given. society are that a person worth listening to will speak dispassionately. people may ﬁnd that their claims are not taken seriously and may believe that they are not treated with equal respect. prefer literal
. as Young agrees. Young generally sympathizes with proponents of deliberative democracy in criticizing aggregative or adversary models of democracy.’’1 Young agrees with the theorists of deliberation that ‘‘democracy is a form of practical reason’’ wherein ‘‘participants arrive at a decision not by determining what preferences have greatest numerical support. do not sufﬁciently account for the ways that democracy must enable people from an enormous range of different social locations to express their ideas and experiences. The dominant expectations in U. for several speciﬁc biases. pressure-group activism. For Young.’’4 This can happen—and in fact tends to happen—because the dominant form of communication in ofﬁcial or mainstream public forums is not socially neutral.S. avoid more than minimal bodily gestures.3 Why should deliberation theorists not assign special primacy to argument. and conceptualizing a form of rationality that is carried out by a public and is able ‘‘to evaluate the moral legitimacy of the substance of decisions. which. norms deﬁning proper ways of communicating in venues ranging from federal judicial hearings to local school board meetings are grounded in historically speciﬁc social and cultural contexts.

Doing this allows communicative forums truly ‘‘to take all needs and interests into account. when the speaker ‘‘announces ‘here I am’ for the other.’’ This physical interaction. and third. and a generally accepted conceptual and normative framework for framing the issues.’’ a necessary condition for formally democratic politics to lead to substantively just outcomes (30).’’ These norms. and ‘I see you’ ’’. Democratic theory and practice. In concrete terms. Greeting refers to ‘‘those moments in everyday communication where people acknowledge one another in their particularity’’. [and] the offering of food and drink. hugs. Young contends. such as ‘‘handshakes. when she further ‘‘announces her distance from the others. In greeting someone. thwart the ability of even those deliberations undertaken by the most radically diverse group of participants from being either truly inclusive or genuinely democratic. ﬁrst. Young identiﬁes three kinds of expression to which communicative democracy should speciﬁcally attend: greeting. to which I am hostage’’ (57–59). there is an ineradicable. What is the nature of this claim. must respond to this problem by expressly valuing forms of communication other than argument.’’ and to speakers who acknowledge that ‘‘there are some premises that all the discussants accept. rhetoric. the ‘‘speech culture of white. in turn. his or her commitment to engaging in a sustained discussion with that other person. People in positions of authority and ordinary citizens alike attribute greater validity to remarks that exhibit ‘‘the construction of an orderly chain of reasoning from premises to conclusion. expresses a sense of ethical obligation that seems to be of an exceptionally strong order: ‘‘the sensual. his or her willingness to trust the other person enough to make the conversation work. second. material proximity of the other person in his or her bodily need and possibility for suffering makes an unavoidable claim on me. racialized or ethnicized minorities.236
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language to metaphor and hyperbole (while still mobilizing abstract concepts with ease). their irreducible particularity. his or her acknowledgment that he or she and the other are in a relationship of
. crucially physical moment in greeting. middle-class men’’ systematically dominates and deauthorizes the communicative endeavors of ‘‘women. and talk in a way indicating the superiority of written speech to other modes of communication. a person ‘‘responds to the other person’s sensible presence. Young insists. and narrative. and what obligations ensue for the greeter? Young speciﬁes that the one who greets another thereby declares.’’ often with physical actions that complement speech.’’ For Young. and working-class people’’ (37–40).

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mutual accountability. The point of democratic communication is to illuminate that context and proceed to address problems within it. . then. provide portals through which particularistic and socially situated experiences can enter into the conversation. . Rhetoric and narrative. Young believes. the act of greeting will have primed the greeter to forego references to what ‘‘all reasonable persons’’ should think in favor of ‘‘more particular’’ appeals based on that knowledge of the other (61).’’ further helps bring that context to the fore. or to the values and cultural meanings that lead the narrator to ‘‘normative starting-points’’ that differ from those that are dominant. rhetoric ‘‘motivates the move from reason to judgment’’ and ‘‘from thinking to committed action’’ (64. Besides concretely acknowledging the characteristics of the audience in its particularity. In the course of a discussion in which there is disagreement. moreover. or the employment of visual media. In contrast. Such a relationship requires the greeter to seek to know the particular circumstances of the one being greeted. which Young also calls ‘‘situated knowledge. Storytelling is often an important bridge in such cases between the mute experience of being wronged and political arguments about justice’’ (37. and suffering of injustice. likewise. the use of ﬁgures of speech. rather than futilely attempting to transcend or avoid it. Storytelling can further help ‘‘afﬁnity groups’’ with shared experiences and exclusions ﬁnd one another and begin to reﬂect
. Young argues that being ‘‘truly rational’’ should mean attending to rhetoric rather than attempting to ‘‘bracket’’ it. interests. even when these experiences cannot yet be meaningfully articulated within the prevailing bounds of rational argument. Ordinary argumentation ‘‘sometimes excludes the expression of some needs. . attributing ‘‘communicative’’ intent to the former but only ‘‘strategic’’ intent to the latter). 72). Narrative. communication is shorn of its practical context. Without rhetoric. because these cannot be voiced within the operative premises and frameworks. 69). Young takes rhetoric to refer to styles of speaking that reﬂect one’s ‘‘attention to the particular audience of one’s communication’’—for instance. can initially sensitize the hearer to the experiences of the storyteller. Narrative. and to be especially attentive to the latter’s vulnerability to suffering that inheres in his or her embodied status. Theorists of deliberation (notably Jurgen Habermas) tend categorically to distinguish ¨ rational speech from rhetoric (in Habermas’s case. including bodily expression (65). an emotional tone.

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collectively on how to deﬁne those experiences and how to secure space for themselves on the public agenda. Against critics who warn of the ease with which greeting. too. however. and rhetoric can be manipulated to derail their inclusive effects on democratic communication. perfectly exemplify the contribution of narrative to communicative democracy (73–75). these alternative forms seem mainly able to set the stage for rational argument in the dominant mode. they demonstrate their willingness to fashion claims in ways that respond to the concrete particularity of the people most directly affected by their proposals. complete with objective-looking statistical data. consciousness-raising groups associated with the women’s movement. For Young. they precede rational argument. despite President Bill Clinton’s famous personal comfort in interacting physically and rhetorically with African Americans. Young gives us some new and potentially inﬂuential ways to evaluate the validity of these claims. go far enough in developing her theory of the role of alternatives to argument within democratic communication? In the cases of greeting and narrative. We could also assess whether. Does Young. Young rightly points out that sticking to what is commonly recognizable as rational argument does not necessarily prevent manipulation or deceit. in which women found safe places to tell stories of battering and sexual harassment. True. Young makes the potentially
. Conservatives have eminently rational-sounding arguments. in a temporal sense. supposedly paid for with fraudulently acquired welfare beneﬁts. either. seem to have much ongoing effect on the structure of rational argument itself. We might consider. narrative. to justify cuts in public assistance to poor women? Why. for example. Young emphasizes that these processes are ‘‘important additions to argument in an enlarged conception of democratic engagement. whether conservative spokespersons have given a genuine greeting to those women’s participation in public discussion. Literally. in their rhetoric. How many times have commentators on the right resorted to anecdotes about ‘‘welfare queens’’ driving Cadillacs. The critics are right to be at least somewhat skeptical.’’ rather than alternatives to argument (79). They do not. that welfare enforces a sense of personal failure and dependency in recipients. did his administration ultimately help redeﬁne afﬁrmative action in terms of ﬁghting ‘‘reverse discrimination’’ against whites? Nevertheless. however. with all the ethical consequences that greeting entails. in discussing greeting. When the Right claims to speak for and in the interests of poor women.

It does not. seems to remain essentially the same. like greeting and narrative. Hence she writes: ‘‘In practice in mass politics this means public acknowledgement by some groups of the inclusion of other social groups or social segments’’ (61). which is also still part of a more broadly conceived practice of rationality. Young herself actually seems to have been thinking more along these lines than she does in Inclusion and Democracy.’’ emphasizing the difﬁculty and limited utility of distinguishing between the rational and the rhetorical (64). ends in themselves. which received its classic formulation in Kant’s conception of the good will and continues to inﬂuence deontological moral thought through to the present. however. serves an instrumental function in orienting argument toward the particular experiences and values of a particular audience or individual. In a discussion of the traditional Western philosophical distinction between reason and affectivity. The case of rhetoric is somewhat more complicated. However.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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quite consequential assertion that speakers in a communicative interaction must avoid appeals to ‘‘all reasonable persons’’ and instead direct their persuasive comments to speciﬁc interlocutors in ways that recognize the interlocutors’ particular social situations. as simply a preliminary. If argument indeed carries with it the sociocultural baggage Young identiﬁes. alter the practice of argument as such. then perhaps an even more effective way of ridding reason of this ballast would be to imagine a less mechanical and additive relationship—that is. Young makes a positive plea to expand the notion of rationality itself to encompass the style and tone of speech. before going on to explicate an argument in the traditional sense. Here. to view rhetoric as part of reason rather than auxiliary or hostile to it. Yet the process of argumentation. She describes this identitarian logic as the compulsion by which ‘‘thought
. Young endorses Adorno’s critique (in Negative Dialectics) of the ‘‘logic of identity’’ that the notion of impartial moral reason presupposes. if it were applied to the individual elements of an argumentative appeal. explicit recognition that this other group is involved in the discussion. Rhetoric. in some sense. In earlier writings on these issues. a more interactive and mutually constitutive relationship— between argument and nonargumentative modes of communication. This would be quite a strong criterion for inclusive communication indeed. elevating the latter from mere instrumental value to being. She further contends that ‘‘any discursive content is embodied in a situated style and rhetoric. Young seems to conceive of this condition of communication in a more limited fashion.

The problem with Habermas.’’5 Anticipating her later work. and mutually transformative relationship between argument and nonargumentative forms of communication. to eliminate otherness. It is a spiritual exercise or regimen by which thought seeks contact with the transcendent. to eliminate all uncertainty and unpredictability. that requires thought to assume an attitude of self-denial toward the concepts that it incessantly produces out of its fecundity. . ﬁnally. Instead of pursuing this task.240
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seeks to have everything under control. the affective aspects of speech. mass culture. together providing the communicative act. both in this earlier piece and in Inclusion and Democracy. such ambiguous and playful forms of expression usually weave in and out of assertive modes. For Adorno.
Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Practices of Communication
As Adorno conceives it. moreover. deﬁned in paradoxically materialist terms as the object in itself.’’6 The challenge for an ethics of communication would thus seem to be to move toward a vision of a communicative practice incorporating a relation of mutual criticism and reconstitution between these two elements. productive. negative dialectics signiﬁes a discipline of subjectivity and subjectivation that responds to what he views as the historically speciﬁc. is his failure to acknowledge that ‘‘in the practical context of communication . It is a process. negative dialectics is an askesis of the intellect in the age of late capitalism. The starting point of negative dialectics is the
. to idealize the bodily fact of sensuous immersion in a world that outruns the subject. and thereby toward a more capacious vision of democratic communication with respect to the inclusion of women and other historically subordinated groups. she goes on to locate and criticize the persistence of this ideal of impartiality within Habermas’s exclusion of ‘‘the concreteness of the body. however. the musical and ﬁgurative aspects of all utterances’’ from his model of ideal communication. . Young backpedals. and the welfare-warfare state. mortal peril of critical thinking in an era of the giant corporation. for Young. I would propose that Young set Adorno aside too soon and that a closer look at Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics helps us make this move toward a more dynamically mediated.

It is a ‘‘sensation’’ that is both ‘‘part of consciousness’’ and ‘‘equally that which consciousness does not exhaust. This generative act (reconstituting the concept as its otherness) thus depends on a stance of ‘‘unswerving negation’’ toward the concepts that thought yields. it never becomes wholly identical. substantively altering and intensifying these relations. however. in Hegel’s terminology. as immediacy’’(39–40). First. it is no longer purely itself. and that objects always leave a ‘‘remainder’’ not contained by their concepts. and allows us to pursue this critique further. to which. Such thinking offers ‘‘insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept’’ and invigorates the concept by reconstituting it as its otherness. Adorno’s suggestion that truth arises from a voluntary effort by rational thought to ‘‘grant precedence’’ to the nonconceptual resonates with key aspects of Young’s critique of deliberation.7 Concepts. As itself it is not itself alone’’ (157).’’ ‘‘the not purely cognitive part of cognition’’ (193). even though every concept by its nature claims identity with its object. though never totally—following upon the exertions of dialectical thought: ‘‘As the concept is experienced as nonidentical. although it is in part both of these things—it also involves a ‘‘somatic’’ or bodily moment. therefore. 159). it leads to its otherness without absorbing that otherness.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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recognition of ‘‘nonidentity’’: the fact that concepts are not identical to their objects. This moment of thought enables thought to ‘‘transcend itself’’ in two ways: ﬁrst. And they do this more potently—and even become these nonconceptualities. toward the ‘‘compulsive identiﬁcation [between concept and object] which the concept brings’’ (12. in the sense of ‘‘disintegrating’’ the false identities declared by its own concepts and moving closer to ‘‘the thing itself’’. Dialectical thinking thus means making the relations between the concept and its nonconceptual otherness reﬂective. in the sense of presenting
. always refer to nonconceptualities. ﬁrst of all. there is a common sense that the truthfulness of rational processes depends crucially on their relation to a moment of physicality. Dialectical thinking relies on a ‘‘moment’’ of thought that Adorno calls ‘‘immediate consciousness’’: ‘‘Whichever part of the object exceeds the deﬁnitions imposed on it by thinking will face the subject. because on its own it does not exhaust itself. This ‘‘moment of spontaneity’’ is neither simply an active cogitation of the mind nor only a making-present of something to the mind. It is deﬁned by that which is outside it. second. a relation that at least temporarily inverts the traditional hierarchies of mind over body and subject over object. as inwardly in motion.

physicality would also become a ‘‘moment’’ within the interaction in a more rigorously dialectical sense. and of the speaker’s ethical obligation not only to try to understand that suffering but also to transform the social forces that cause this suffering. which he notes has traditionally striven to vouchsafe its own truth by establishing its otherness from rhetoric (56). Since philosophy aims to
. Such a dialectic would substantialize—quite literally ﬂesh out—the relationship of mutual accountability that Young provocatively contends is established by greeting.’ Hence the convergence of speciﬁc materialism with criticism. Rhetoric is in jeopardy.’’ a ﬂeeting prelude to a conversation that would then proceed as an ordinary exchange of ideas. Accordingly. concerns. Young’s emphasis on the physical aspect of greeting can be deepened and made more exacting with reference to this component of negative dialectics. Woe speaks: ‘Go. Referring back to Adorno can further help us hone Young’s argument on behalf of the inclusionary. we might conceive this spontaneous welcoming of the other in her concrete physicality and particularity as involving an additional element that Young herself does not address: an element of negativity. expressing a recognition by the speaker of the necessary failure of her conception of the other to grasp the truth of the other’s needs. It holds a place among the postulates of contents already known and ﬁxed. Adorno himself calls for ‘‘a critical rescue of the rhetorical element’’ for the good of philosophy. ‘‘rhetoric represents that which cannot be thought except in language. such that these sensations would repeatedly infuse the speaker’s attempts to articulate rational claims and allow the speaker to gain a critical perspective on every such claim’s constitutive inability to attend entirely to the other’s experiences. that things should be different. because it may easily come to usurp what the thought cannot obtain directly from the presentation’’ (55). physical sensation would not only have a role within the communicative interaction as a temporal ‘‘moment. democratizing implications of rhetoric. ‘‘In philosophy. Beyond this. in ways that make her conception of inclusive communicative practices better able to challenge the tendencies of rational argument to reproduce social domination. with social change in practice’’ (145. 203).242
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thought with an ethical-practical imperative: ‘‘The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be. Finally. Further. like any substitute. this more dialectical relation between rational assertion and sensation would continually reintroduce a sense of the other’s suffering physicality into the interaction.’’ he writes. and social situation.

enacts. socially situated particularity.’’ Absent these elements of persuasion. ‘‘already known and ﬁxed’’ contents. Nevertheless. to the point where the difference fades. leads us to specify further that communication displays. Young develops the notion of the practical import of rhetoric beyond the merely suggestive form it takes in Adorno’s text. Adorno’s conception of the dialectical relation between rhetoric and cognition offers a basis on which to enhance the dynamism and interactivity of the relation between rhetoric and argument in Young’s theory. Young urges us to see argumentative discourse as ‘‘embodied’’ in rhetoric. but rather would imbue and transform the structure of argument
. enabling the speaker to express her sense of accountability to her listeners through a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic means that resonate in a familiar way with them. it has continually sought to ‘‘abolish language’’—to get to the truth of its object by decisively getting beyond language as such. Dialectics appropriates for the power of thought what historically seemed to be a ﬂaw in thinking: its link with language.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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know the truth that lies behind such immediately accessible. as it threatens to do in Young’s theory. rhetoric not only brings the practical context of speech to a higher level of self-reﬂection and explicitness—it further provides the motivation that enables the leap from critical-reﬂective thought to political and social action. ameliorating the instrumentalism of this latter association. Adorno contends. Adorno. and to appreciate both the content and style of argument as coequal elements of reason. Young makes the related but more nuanced point that rhetoric situates a communicative intervention in a speciﬁc relation to a particular audience. Adorno proposes ‘‘dialectics—literally: language as the organon of thought. As we have seen. such that at every step of the argument the speaker’s words are shaped by the practice of attending to the audience in its concrete. lies not in any deﬁnitive disjunction of reality from language but rather in ‘‘a mutual approximation of thing and expression. Adorno criticizes traditional philosophy for disdaining rhetoric because the latter ‘‘is incessantly corrupted by persuasive purposes. in turn. and generates the most robust form of reason when truth-claims and the rhetorical aspects of argument continually refer back to each other.’’ Truth. ‘‘the thought act would no longer have a practical relation’’ (55). And for Young. Adorno argues. Such stringency would approach a guarantee that rhetoric would not wind up a mere auxiliary to argument. Focusing on communication rather than (only) philosophical reﬂection. which nothing can wholly break’’ (55–56). As an alternative and antidote.

even as it both falsely claims to do so and gestures toward the nonidentical. the glimmer of understanding of women’s normally unrepresented experiences that narrative provides can become the basis for a
. however. Adorno writes. the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior. with its built-in and unavoidable basic premises.’’ ‘‘clowning. For Young.’’ and ‘‘mimesis’’ (14–15). he advocates a more ﬂexible. is the concept’s inevitable failure to achieve full identity with its object. since ‘‘constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the ‘more’ which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being. Rather than suggesting a total abandonment of systematizing thought.244
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at its most minute levels. By gathering around the object of cognition. The primary problem to be overcome. Adorno thus proposes the construction of provisional ‘‘constellations’’ of concepts as an alternative to exclusive reliance on the ‘‘step-by-step progression from the concepts to a more general cover concept’’ (162). Adorno. particularized practice for coming ‘‘to perceive the individual moment in its immanent connection with others’’ (26). invariably excludes certain experiences and values that cannot ﬁnd expression within this normative framework. in thinking. Young’s argument on behalf of admitting narrative into democratic communication can also be adjusted by applying an Adornian perspective. Recall that Young defends narrative as a valid and necessary element of democratic deliberation because she recognizes that the logical structure of an argument. ‘‘illuminates the speciﬁc side of the object. Hence the need for philosophy as the composition of constellations. the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden’’ (162). The constellation. improvisatory. Yet it is not just concepts as such that create this problem. ‘‘to the point where the difference fades’’ between rhetoric and the logic of propositional truth-claims. once more. within which the whole systematically imposes meaning on the parts. criticizing the regimenting universalism of idealist logic as the quintessence of ‘‘rage’’ against the nonidentical (23). They attain. what was necessarily excised from thinking’’ (162). in a way that enhances the prospects that allowing storytelling into the conversation will make the communicative interaction more substantially inclusive. but more pointedly concepts as they are mobilized within logically structured discourse. is preoccupied with the exclusionary operations of systematic thinking. too. Constellation building requires a deliberate relaxation of systematic methodicism and a concomitant animation of thought with elements of ‘‘play.

Accordingly. rhetoric. Rethinking Young’s analyses of greeting. undergirding a new or revised. less instrumental conception of the relation between rational argument and less normatively authoritative forms of communication. They would instead migrate into the interior of such arguments. Negative dialectics. Adorno yet again prods us to imagine a less linear. communicative style. and to the continuously unfolding critical implications of each for the other. of consciousness. In the interest of making communication more inclusive of women and other historically subordinated groups. . an ideal that any number of practical constraints on actual com-
. and thus more conducive to justice. that is. Immigration. and narrative must supplement traditionally conceived processes of deliberation. We might envision. logically structured argument about the meaning and nature of justice. and Meatpacking
Admittedly. re-creating their structures from within. narrative-constellations would not simply generate new starting points for arguments about justice conducted in the traditional mode. producing a form of argument that involved a highly mobile attentiveness to both personal stories and abstract normative claims. But these democratizing effects can become all the more pronounced if the relations between the traditional and nontraditional communicative practices Young discusses are set in dialectical relation to each other rather than merely instrumentally conjoined. a ‘‘doubled mode of conduct’’ in which ‘‘both attitudes of consciousness are linked by criticizing one another’’ (31). the playful and experimental juxtaposition of women’s personal narratives to form constellations illuminating experiential particularity. . entails a ‘‘mobility . Young argues that elements of physicality. for Adorno. and storytelling in light of Adorno thus yields the following general point.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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new normative ground. brought about through an ongoing negative-dialectical relation between theory and constellation.
Preparing for Dialectics-in-Communication: Gender. and these thought-images would then furnish the necessary negativity for the continual revitalization of theories of justice.’’ an ‘‘interactive’’ relation between ‘‘theory’’ and the immediate experiences of the object made possible by constellations. this praxis of communication sounds demanding in the extreme.

The point is for this more socially advantaged listener to take and demonstrate responsibility for becoming more capable of engaging in communication with the Other that continually reanimates rational formulations of ethical standards and political strategies by dialectically incorporating the particular experiences of the Other. nor any special role of this individual to make dialectics or theory ‘‘happen’’ in a communicative context. But of course. A more serious challenge. because there are certainly moments of individual responsibility within intersubjective encounters that this model of negative-dialectical communication can help us theorize. but not impossible. Such constraints range from inevitable lapses of concentration to the predictable need to clarify or more thoroughly justify particular rational claims. which. It is unnecessary to view this shift of categories as fundamentally suspect. I want to propose here that negative dialectics can be most readily incorporated into the inclusive communicative practices Young advocates as a praxis of listening to the Other across power-saturated divisions of class. however. the main idea both for her and for me is to broaden the understanding of what
. such circumstances also pose obstacles to individual critical reﬂection in the mode of negative dialectics. nonetheless. It is important to stress here that I mean to imply neither any essentialist. but rather that the latter is speaking and the former is listening—though in a way that itself curiously involves aspects of greeting and rhetoric. they make it more difﬁcult. would necessarily distract from the effort to keep the dialectical moment of physical sensation alive. higher theoretical capacity of the socially privileged interlocutor. It also implies a special attentiveness by the former to the thought-images that might arise through the constellational juxtaposition of the Other’s stories. This means that we need to turn the tables brieﬂy and imagine not that the more privileged interlocutor is the speaker who is greeting and rhetorically addressing the one whose voice is usually muted or silenced. precisely by forcing the speaker to spell out her logic more carefully and systematically. race. gender. or a combination of these. Notwithstanding the truth of what Young writes about subaltern groups’ historical lack of access to education and other beneﬁts that interpellate subjects as rational agents.246
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municative interactions could easily sabotage. where the ability and responsibility for fostering dialectical reﬂection is shared rather than individual. might be that we go astray by attempting to apply categories intended for a critical praxis of subject-object relations to intersubjective interactions. as Young does.

Sandra Stewart.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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‘‘theory’’ is and to conceptualize new ways for members of dominant groups to think and act in response to the legitimate insistence by subaltern intellectuals that it is not their responsibility to teach the members of these privileged groups about their own racism and sexism. which she had sustained because the speed of production left her too little time to sharpen her knife. described suffering infections in her hands because she had found it impossible to keep her gloves clean while keeping up with the line speed. The workers emphasized. The following example might help illustrate such an interactive context. she alone had fundamental responsibility for making her children’s future as bright as possible. a beef-processing worker at Tyson. More women than men spoke at the event. probably reﬂecting the somewhat greater reliance of Tyson on male labor. and critically reworking Young’s theory with the aid of Adorno helps us imagine how these might be deﬁned. which represents the workers at several large meatpacking and food-processing plants. who worked on the line making frozen Hot Pockets at Lamb-Weston. Maria Chavez.9
. who also worked at Tyson in processing. Teresa Moreno. recently held a public event to denounce unsafe working conditions and to build community support for the workers’ efforts to improve job-related health and safety and increase respect for workers’ dignity. with English translation provided) to the ways they had suffered physically and emotionally as a result of unsafe. Innovative practices of listening seem a good place to start. and constitute roughly 40 percent of the workforce at the Tyson Fresh Meats beef-processing plant (which at that time was owned by Iowa Beef Producers [ibp]). moreover. Teamsters Local 556.8 Mexican immigrant women make up a majority of the workforce at the two frozen-food plants (Smith Frozen Foods and Lamb-Weston). In a small city near the place where I live in rural eastern Washington State. although there were more men than women in the audience. told of how she had decided to challenge the verbally abusive behavior of supervisors out of consideration for the fact that ‘‘someday [her] children might have to work there’’ and that. All the workers gave personal testimony (most of it in Spanish. unsanitary. recounted how what could have been a temporary disability had become permanent because the company had refused to send her to a doctor for an injury. as a single mother. that these practices were usually related to inordinately high speeds of production and called for these speeds to be diminished. or to rid them of it. and abusive practices on the part of their employers.

private liberal arts college. What is required is for these listeners to prepare themselves for articulating the kind of greeting and employing the sort of rhetoric Young has in mind and for engaging in some level of dialectical interaction between greeting and argument. physical particularity—when reﬂecting on that person’s rational demands for a reduced speed of production and for community involvement in disputes with management. to maximize genuine appreciation of the speakers’ speciﬁc experiences and ideas. But these preparatory askeses are easier to imagine in themselves.10 (2) tried to the greatest extent possible to hang on to the moment of immediate sensation in encountering each of the speakers—in his or her self-manifested. to invoke a sense of mutual accountability. of course. To conceive of what the dialectical incorporation of narrative constellations into deliberative contexts might look like. of ever exactly seeing things from the other’s point of view). we need to
. and between workers and community members. injured. and (4) listened and observed each speaker carefully to gain a sense of the forms of rhetoric that might eventually work to communicate back to that individual a conﬁrming recognition that this relationship of mutual accountability existed. in turn.248
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Besides other workers. Engaging in such preparation for communication is. Most of the workers were Mexican. in actual communication. while most though not all the community members were Anglo/a. professionals. (3) attended to the speakers’ attempts to use rhetoric to address community members in their concrete particularity. and when contemplating courses of moralpractical action in response to the worker’s statements. and between rhetoric and argument. a way conducive to facilitating subsequent communication among workers. They would do this by receiving the workers’ speeches in such a way that the listeners (1) had a constant reminder to themselves of their inevitable failure to understand wholly the speakers’ experiences (or. not the same thing as carrying out the kinds of dialecticsin-communication that I sketched earlier in my initial attempt to elaborate and stretch Young’s theory with reference to negative dialectics. and religious persons from the community. to eschew the Habermasian fantasy of ‘‘symmetrical reciprocity’’ in communication. as Young puts it elsewhere. and they also help us envision a bit more clearly how such dialectics-in-communication could actually come into practice. Our Adornian reworking of Young’s theory enables us to conceptualize a particular way in which these audience members could receive the comments and physical presence of the speakers. the audience included students from an elite.

in particular a health and safety survey of the workers and plans to bring a reform proposal to management. insofar as both the community activist and one of the two union ofﬁcials—indeed. individual narrative furnished the dominant tone. and both prefaced their more extended remarks about organizing tactics with references to their own workrelated injuries. Nonetheless. and purposive-rational comments of Schlosser and the organizers. generalizing. Thus. the main point of the workers’ speeches was to appeal to the audience in the mode of personal narrative. and then channeling that aroused sentiment into a prearranged path of action.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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examine the structure and agenda of the event as a whole. and purpose for the current line-workers’ speeches. form. it is undeniable that. a dynamic he saw as generated and easily controllable by big business and the bureaucratic state. who exhorted audience members to join in the workers’ struggle for justice and reported on the steps that were being taken to challenge the companies. It is also worth noting that the agenda did not restrict women to the discursive mode of narrating direct personal and bodily experience. the union’s principal ofﬁcer and central leader— were women. given by Eric Schlosser. unless we are prepared to endorse an extreme and monolithic view of the pall cast by ‘‘instrumental reason’’ over the late capitalist world.and worker-safety hazards in the meatpacking industry. The workers’ remarks came ﬁrst and were followed by a keynote address. Now. from a purely instrumentalist perspective. the workers not only related their stories of suffering and mistreatment but also articulated causal claims to the effect that production-speed goals and management practices were to blame. I want to avoid overstating the distinctions between these various speakers. as I have mentioned. Adorno would certainly have been attuned to these instrumentalist aspects of the situation and would likely have criticized them for reﬂecting a general societal tendency by which genuinely dialectical thought was increasingly giving way to a philosophically and politically barren vacillation between emotionalistic subjectivism and a technocratic obsession with action. both union ofﬁcials had been workers in the meatpacking plant for many years. it seems
. setting the stage for the more abstract. In addition. The forum involved three kinds of speeches. The ﬁnal speakers were union ofﬁcers and a community activist. the order and relative emphases of the speeches in the forum followed a well-worn formula for effective political organizing: sparking outrage and sympathy through personal stories that engender emotional responses.11 Nevertheless. author of ´ Fast Food Nation. the popular expose of food.

was the experience of mistreatment by supervisors as something held in common by Mexican and nonMexican workers alike. What precisely did this constellation ‘‘represent’’ that the individual narratives themselves were not capable of making accessible to these audience members? In part. in part. so likewise here it is necessary to shift our perspective from that of the speakers to that of the listeners. Besides serving to energize and mobilize a political coalition. dissident reform movement led by Teamsters for a Democratic Union.’’ with its suppression of rank-and-ﬁle activism and routine cooperation with employers in exchange for secure positions and a steady ﬂow of membership dues. was neither a Mexican immigrant nor of Mexican origin. which is struggling against not only corporations but also the culture of ‘‘business unionism’’ favored by the Hoffa-allied ‘‘old guard. The workers did not present their remarks deliberately in the form of a constellation of narratives. And it was. We can begin to map this space by considering the workers’ personal stories as a constellation of narratives. Local 556 is afﬁliated with the prodemocracy. the irony and double bind faced by wage-earning women who labor for paychecks to contribute to their families’ well-being. composing a constellation out of their stories required the agency of the listener. although the event planners facilitated this step by placing the workers’ speeches all together in the ﬁrst part of the program. the forum can also be viewed as an occasion at least potentially creating space for inclusive communication across lines of social difference that could involve elements of negative dialectics. yet in doing so may expose their families to new rigors of disciplinary intervention by corporate institu-
. which became more vivid through the juxtaposition of Stewart’s testimony with the other two women’s stories than would have been possible through the former’s narrative alone. to achieve some notion of how what could be called constellational communication might work in practice. after all. most sturdily underpinned the ascendancy of instrumental rationality. then. this ‘‘more. since one of the speakers.’’ as Adorno calls it.250
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unjustiﬁed simply to dismiss the forum as wholly manipulative in this manner and to disregard the prospects for critically reﬂective communication to which it may have given rise. It was also partly the experience of being simultaneously a victim and a responsible agent. for Adorno. grounded in a spirit of resistance to the economic forces that. Such a preemptory move seems especially unnecessary given that this forum was. Sandra Stewart. Instead. As was the case with rhetoric and greeting.

and Latino social theories more broadly? Doing this would mean listening to Schlosser’s citations of the appalling national statistics on worker injuries in the meatpacking industry in a way that not only appreciates the magnitude of these ﬁgures but also questions how the hazards posed by elevated chain speeds differently affect men and women. were listeners to critically juxtapose these moments with general diagnoses of these workers’ situation. and how they have distinct consequences for white and Mexican workers. and hence a threat to the ‘‘American’’ people.and gender-speciﬁc circumstances. Chicano. Marxist. is still just a preliminary step toward the dialectic between such immediacy and theory in a communicative context that I proposed above might be possible.12 Constructing these constellations and discerning the insights they make available. as a mode of listening. inasmuch as it reminds us of the long and painful history of restrictive U. with proposals for political action in response. critical relation with social theory? What would the practical consequences be. Weaving an awareness of the thought-images composed through narrative constellations into mundane practices of communication could further lead to changes in political strategy. attending to these constellational moments could help spark a critical reconsideration of the union’s hitherto commonsense position that the key to effective and inclusive mobilization of the rank and ﬁle is to organize based on the spatial distribution of work groups and the problems experienced by workers as ‘‘workers. This irony emerges when one considers Stewart’s stalwart commitment to improving her children’s future in relation to Chavez’s disturbing account of how the company humiliated her and violated her family’s privacy by blaming her family members for causing her infections and by proceeding to investigate the cleanliness of her home and the hygiene of her relatives.S. Above all. At the same time. Constellational communication further means ﬁnding in the workers’ testimonies moments of critical illumination regarding social theory.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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tions. and with feminist. the relation of contrast evoked by this constellation calls our attention to a particular experience of racism. How could community members and the male or white workers in the audience not only engage in constellational apprehension but further bring these narrativebased moments of ‘‘spontaneous experience’’ into a sustained. These experiences
.’’ rather than making special efforts to address the race. likely diseased. border-control policies that have reﬂected a stubborn suspicion that Mexican immigrants are unclean.

to call attention to women’s domination through corporate and government systems of ‘‘public patriarchy. with its special resources of negativity. the efforts of some thinkers. Instead.’’ and to characterize these power circuitries as just as crucial to understanding women’s contemporary experiences as the intrafamilial relations that are emphasized by many feminist theorists. however. depend vitally on the persistence of negation. This historical imperative. for instance. including Young as well as Nancy Fraser and Carol Brown. before concluding this discussion of Adornian modiﬁcations of Young’s suggested practices of inclusive communication. is the near-total evaporation of the social bases for autonomous.
Conclusion: On the Historical Grounds of Negative Dialectics
We should turn again to the relationship Adorno sees between social theory and philosophical method. All these constructive endeavors. The logic of negative dialectics requires that the force of narrative constellations not simply be subsumed in a ﬁnalistic.252
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of insight conﬁrm. Quite to the contrary. he insists that philosophical method in general should self-consciously respond to its sociohistorical situation and that negative dialectics in particular has a historical warrant. hegemony. and sorties against.14 They also counsel the value of carrying forward the Gramscian project of analyzing how class is lived and contested not only through speciﬁc work processes but also through conﬁgurations of. constellational thinking. linear way by giving rise to better-developed critical-social theory and plans for action. theorized most extensively in Dialectic of Enlightenment and reinvoked in Negative Dialectics. should come into play with each stitch in the fabric of communicative—and listening—praxis. they resonate with attempts in the wake of the Chicano movement to rethink Mexican racial-ethnic solidarity in nonessentializing ways that enable communication with people of other racial positionings. conceived in gendered national and transnational terms. For Adorno does not see negative dialectics as a universally valid method of critical-reﬂective thought.13 Likewise. critical subjectivity as a result of the epochal transitions from bourgeois-liberal
.

theoretical account of social power relations. by insisting that Marxist social theory had to break free from the solipsism of its traditional categories and concepts of analysis. with his lifelong emphasis on the crucial signiﬁcance of culture for social-power relations. was anything but a proponent of vulgar economic determinism. This certainly does not mean. and from bourgeois culture to mass culture. there is more than a slight afﬁnity between Adorno’s exhortations to think the cultural. that the justiﬁcation for thinking in terms of negative dialectics vanishes once theorists start interpreting history from a feminist perspective. Moreover. but rather engage in a perpetual dialectic of mutual criticism with a historically attuned. and these had no structural inﬂuence on the shape of the theory as a whole. Adorno can be seen as radically challenging the boundaries of received social theory in a manner not unlike that found in later. from the early liberal state to the national-security state. Rather. economic. we can view Adorno’s injunctions about the relationship between negative dialectics and late capitalism as one model of how to accomplish a more general and more ﬂexible goal: formulating methods of critical reﬂection and communicative practice that do not seek a grounding in (or as) abstract. As I noted at the outset of this chapter. and on those aspects of the class struggle in which (white) men have been the principal agents.15 Hence.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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to corporate capitalism. by virtue of the critical force unleashed by dialectical reﬂection on historically speciﬁc experiences of nonidentity. however. Social theory was for him no ‘‘objective science’’ but rather a historically situated labor of reﬂective thought that itself was forever in need of determinate negation in light of the nonidentical that each of its successive renderings inevitably excluded. it is essential to remember that Adorno. which regards the social rela-
. absolutist-universalist principles. socialist feminist writings—as making a call for social theory to reinvent itself through rigorous engagement with concrete particularity in ways hitherto uncontemplated by historical materialists focused exclusively on the class struggle. additionally. and political dimensions of social power as a totality and Young’s argument some years ago (against models of ‘‘separate spheres’’ of patriarchal and capitalist domination) that ‘‘we need not merely a synthesis of feminism with traditional Marxism. but also a thoroughly feminist historical materialism. On a more substantive level. Adorno’s theory of late capitalist society included only scattered reﬂections on conditions faced by women.

labor conﬂicts. for negative-dialectical thinking. who are presumed to be nonworking. precisely this demand for giving voice to the nonidentical furnishes the historical warrant. despite the fact that Mexican women are generally viewed as submissive and compliant. Iris Marion Young. and independent actions of these women.S. bereft of any compensatory recognition by employers of their concrete. and narrative that Young favors is necessary to enable the autonomous.19 Stretching the bounds of ordinary communication to involve the alternative practices of greeting.S. research on patterns of migration and union activism has shown that Mexican women usually make their own decisions about when and how to migrate north. as well as their experiences of powerlessness. 2000). hyperfecund leeches on public budgets. Inclusion and Democracy. in this contemporary situation. labor force.
. rhetoric. to be communicated in their concrete particularity and bodily immediacy. and especially in their dimensions of physicality.18 Finally. along with practices that would alter them. routinely ignore these women’s structural role in the U.17 Even less attention is paid to these workers’ vulnerability to the most extreme forms of labor commodiﬁcation. 21. 22–23. insofar as a silencing or denial of women’s experiences in their concrete particularity. and abuse. the rhythms and rigors of negative dialectics can indeed enrich attempts by theorists such as Young to conceptualize those relations of power. responsible. Young.20
Notes
1. least secure jobs that are most difﬁcult to unionize. in many instances use ﬁnancial resources and social networks outside their husbands’ control. and often take on more militant roles than men do in U.254
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tions of a particular historical social formation as one system in which gender differentiation is a core attribute. constitutes an important element of women’s subordination in contemporary society. To return a ﬁnal time to our main example. At the same time. concentrated as immigrant workers are in the lowest-paid. 2. Mexican immigrant working-class women have numerous experiences that are especially prone to being suppressed and misrepresented in mainstream discourses. Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press. exploitation. particular needs.’’16 Accordingly. Proponents of welfare and social-service restrictions for immigrant women.

4. Washington. 1990). and Enlarged Thought. 10.: Third Woman Press. see Ignacio M. ‘‘A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’: Tracing a Keyword of the U. 1996). and the Politics of Need Interpretation. bk. . Negative Dialectics.: South End Press. On the race nationalism of the Chicano movement.’’ in Throwing Like a Girl. 223–43. 1997). Further page references are cited in the text. Young. There are certainly interesting resonances to explore. 5. (Berkeley. Young. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reﬂections on the ‘‘Postsocialist’’ Condition (New York: Routledge. B..’’ in Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender. Perea (New York: New York University Press.’’ in Unruly Practices: Power. My paraphrasing and quotation of the speakers’ comments draws on my personal notes as an observer of and participant in the event. Rodrıguez. Nancy Fraser. 1998). 94–98. Mass.’’ in Soziologische Schriften II. between negative dialectics and Young’s emphases in other parts of Inclusion and Democracy on a stringent and perpetual questioning of representations of social objectivity (through the increasing inclusion of differentiated social positionalities in communicative contexts).’’ over a notion of democratic engagement that is more focused on the mutual acknowledgment of differences and more attentive to the repressive potential of a hegemonic notion of the common good. Discourse. Adorno. Theodor W. See Nestor P. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. 1973). ´ ´ 12. Ashton (New York: Continuum. Cherrıe L. 1972). 7. however. trans. ed. Juan F. Welfare. For attempts to imagine a ´ more racially inclusive and alliance-based politics. 1997). 1975). For an especially clear statement by Adorno of his critique of vulgar Marxist ‘‘economism’’
. 1990). networked contexts within mass-scale societies. Anzaldua. John Cumming (New York: Continuum. and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wonder. Iris Marion Young. ‘‘Humanism.S. which is my task in this chapter. Susan Buck-Morss and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1997). 62–67. eds. Gesammelte Schriften. 3d ed. ‘‘Women and the Welfare State. Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos (Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Dialectic of Enlightenment. and on a detotalized conception of social institutions. 5. E. ‘‘The Social Construction of the U. see ‘‘The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses.’’ 106. or the idea that ‘‘deliberative democracy must proceed on the basis of common understanding. Welfare State. Further page references are cited in the text. ´ 14. ‘‘Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory. Inclusion and Democracy. 1989). De Colores Means All of ´ Us: Latina Views for a Multi-colored Century (Cambridge. and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press. Iris Marion Young. 2002). argument-oriented practices of communication.’’ in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 55. 13. Iris Marion Young.-Mexico Border. Young also criticizes deliberative democracy theorists for privileging unity. 9. See Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon. Garcıa. Adorno has most to offer in elaborating and reworking elements of Young’s critique of speciﬁc. ‘‘Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect. 38–59.Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication
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3.’’ in Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-immigrant Impulse in the United States. She further contends that democratic theory needs to rid itself of the fetish of face-to-face discussion and endeavor to conceptualize meaningful democratic participation that occurs in multiple. Moraga and Gloria E. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of ´ Color. on 20 January 2002. see Elizabeth Martınez. 1. Adorno. The forum was sponsored by Teamsters Local 556 and was held at the Laborer’s Union Hall in Pasco. ‘‘Women.’’ in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. vol. Calif. 11. For Adorno’s development of these themes. 15.’’ in Nancy Fraser. Political Philosophy. Gynocentrism.S. 73–91. ‘‘Impartiality and the Civic Public. 7–141. 8. and Feminist Politics. trans. ed. Iris Marion Young. 9. 6.

Old Unions: Organizing Undocumented Workers in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Temple University Press. the simple fact that a historical warrant for negative-dialectical thinking exists neither guarantees nor explains how it is that such a force of compulsion comes to be felt. See Edna Bonacich and Richard P. 16. Gendered Transitions. Here it would be beneﬁcial to take recourse to Gramsci.: MIT Press. ed. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mass. acknowledged. and yielded to by historically situated subjects—in this case. ed. Perea (New York: New York University Press. ‘‘Cultural Criticism and Society. 205–19. and Immigration. See Hector Delgado. 18. 1990).
.’’ in Prisms. 20. Adorno’s theory is of limited utility in addressing this pivotal question of cultural politics because this issue shifts the focus from the interplay of history and aesthetic or philosophical form to issues of political leadership. and to theorists of ‘‘intellectual’’ activity in the Gramscian vein such as Stuart Hall and Andrew Ross. Iris Marion Young. Appelbaum. 1983). Juan F. ‘‘Who Does What? California’s Emerging Plural Labor Force. N. 2000).: Cornell University Press. New Immigrants. 30. see Theodor Adorno. ´ 19. David Lopez and Cynthia Feliciano. 1993). for example. 17. Dorothy E. Hondagneu-Sotelo. Shierry Weber and Samuel Weber (Cambridge. 53–97. Of course.256
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and his vision of the need for a mutually transformative dialectic between cultural criticism and social theory.’’ in Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-immigrant Impulse in the United States. 19–34. ‘‘Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory. ‘‘Who May Give Birth to Citizens? Reproduction. See Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. 1996).’’ in Organizing Immigrants: The Challenge for Unions in Contemporary California. trans. Eugenics. Ruth Milkman (Ithaca. Roberts.’’ in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2000). 28–33. 25–48.Y. 1994). although such discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter. by the workers and community members who participated in the forum. Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

California (October 2001). Adorno’s critique identiﬁes crucial issues that contemExcerpts from this chapter were presented at a Critical Theory Roundtable in Hayward. who organized ´ the asa panel. and in the panel ‘‘Socio-Political Issues in Feminism and Aesthetics’’ at the American Society for Aesthetics (asa) meeting in Coral Gables. especially L. Florida (November 2002). I wish to thank the participants in these sessions for their comments. Developed in the 1930s and 1940s before the rise of new social movements. I also wish to thank Matt Klaassen for his research assistance and Renee Heberle for her instructive comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
.12
Feminist Politics and the Culture Industry
Adorno’s Critique Revisited
Lambert Zuidervaart
Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry is both highly relevant and historically dated. both theoretically provocative and politically problematic. Ryan Musgrave.

excludes women or marginalizes their voices.’’4 Adorno’s stance looks problematic from a feminist perspective.
Feminism and Aesthetic Autonomy
The idea of aesthetic autonomy emerged from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe. Adorno sided with other modernists against the avant-garde and against advocates of political ‘‘commitment’’ in the arts and scholarship. Bertolt ´ Brecht. In the twentieth century modernist aesthetics made an emphasis on authentic works of art central to the idea of aesthetic autonomy. rather. one that aims to overcome the limitations of Adorno’s critique and to support a feminist cultural politics. What I have described as the ‘‘paradoxical modernism’’ of Adorno’s aesthetics took shape in this environment. and it has penetrated most deeply into works that present themselves as politically dead. in shoring up a patriarchal culture. and Georg Lukacs in the 1930s. as Peter Burger has argued.258
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porary feminism needs to address. feminist resistance aims especially at an autono-
. however. He seems to endorse the very notion that is resisted by feminist cultural politics: a Western notion of aesthetic autonomy that. are properly independent from other types of human endeavor and need to follow their own rules. This chapter is an exercise in critical retrieval. I conclude by proposing a reconﬁgured notion of aesthetic autonomy.1 It posits that the arts. I ﬁrst identify a tension within feminism concerning the idea of aesthetic autonomy. Although his critique turns on an idea of aesthetic autonomy to which many feminists object. Not without criticism. then examine the role this idea plays in Adorno’s critique of the culture industry. As Mary Devereaux has shown. ‘‘This is not a time for political works of art. the modernist attempt to anchor aes¨ thetic autonomy in authentic artworks was challenged both by avantgarde movements such as Dada and surrealism and by a turn toward socially engaged art at both ends of the political spectrum.3 As he puts it in his polemical statement from the 1960s.2 In debate with Walter Benjamin. politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art. their objections make social-theoretical assumptions that Adorno’s critique can challenge. and the sorts of experience that the arts afford.

’’ Devereaux explains: Historically. the feminist critique of aesthetic autonomy threatens to ignore or underestimate ‘‘the elements that make art art.e. which Adorno shares. and what John Stuart Mill called ‘‘the tyranny of the majority. Devereaux raises concerns that resonate with Adorno’s worries about politically engaged art. Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg seems to sever art from its roots in embodied lives and to gut its role in politics and society. the feminist critique of aesthetic autonomy might have the unintended consequence of ‘‘exposing art to political interference. But the critique of aesthetic autonomy also has potential problems from a feminist perspective. Indeed. claiming the illegitimacy of any evaluative criteria other than the purely aesthetic. has masculinist implications that feminists have persuasively criticized in the past several decades. Theoretically. as distinct from content and context. one theoretical and the other practical.’’ When threatened with interference. when Adorno criticized politically engaged art in the 1960s. An autonomist stress on the formal side of art. artists and their supporters simply appealed to the idea of the ‘‘autonomy’’ of art.. Devereaux. formalist approaches to art history and art criticism not only misinterpret politically engaged art but also exclude women from the canon of artistic achievement. Practically.5 The formalism of. would include formal matters. then why not its failure to promote the ‘‘family values’’ demanded by Senator Jesse Helms and others on the political right?6 In a similar vein. If a work’s misogyny may be relevant to its assessment as art. narrowly deﬁned. the separation of the aesthetic and the political has provided an argument both against artistic censorship. feminist critics of autonomy need a principled basis for distinguishing legitimate from nonlegitimate grounds of evaluation. Adorno would have recognized and refused the dilemma De-
. one reason for doing so was that such art lent unintended support to a dangerous moral censoriousness that abetted Germany’s postwar repression of guilt and suffering.Feminist Politics and the Culture Industry
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mist emphasis on formal qualities in art and on formal criteria for evaluating art. She says that an otherwise beneﬁcial rejection of aesthetic autonomy runs two risks. say. Moreover. But having abandoned strictly ‘‘aesthetic’’ (i.’’ Among such elements. While granting the legitimacy of the feminist critique. like Adorno. formal) criteria in favor of a wider set of political and social considerations.

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vereaux poses for aesthetics: ‘‘either adopt a theory of autonomy that protects art from the exigencies of political fashion but isolates it from life, or opt for a political conception of art that integrates art with life at the price of compromising its independence.’’ To avoid this dilemma, Devereaux proposes to redeﬁne aesthetic autonomy as ‘‘the idea that works of art deserve a protected space, a special normative standing.’’ By ‘‘protected space’’ she means that ‘‘works of art . . . remain under the control of artists and the institutions of the art world in which they work.’’ Artworks deserve such protection for a political reason, she says, for ‘‘they often play an important social and political role: pushing beyond or challenging existing ways of seeing and thinking about the world.’’7 This formulation reminds one of Adorno’s describing autonomous art as ‘‘the social antithesis of society’’ whose critical capacities depend on its relative independence from the rest of society.8 But Adorno would have questioned Devereaux’s emphasis on a ‘‘protected space.’’ For he considers late capitalist society as a whole to be much more integrated and much more oppressive than Devereaux assumes. To think that existing practices and institutions of art could secure a ‘‘protected space’’ from ‘‘political interference,’’ even if only in a symbolical fashion, would be politically naive and theoretically myopic. Naive, because the dominant institutions of government work hand in glove with an exploitative economy. Myopic, because the government-maintained capitalist system surrounds and permeates the very spaces that are supposed to be protected. Despite Adorno’s emphasis on aesthetic autonomy, then, the social theory informing his paradoxical modernism resembles the social theories of radical and socialist feminists who have a strong critique of aesthetic autonomy.9 Both radical and socialist feminists launch their critiques of aesthetic autonomy out of opposition to the societal system as a whole— precisely that system to which autonomous art offers an important social antithesis, according to Adorno. Radical feminists think that the oppression of women stems from a patriarchal social system that has either biological or cultural roots. This patriarchal system thoroughly devalues women and their experience. Liberation would require breaking the grip of patriarchy on women’s lives. The path to that lies in either subverting the patriarchal system or escaping it by developing a counterculture. Socialist feminists also think that the oppression of women is systemic. They differ, however, in understanding the system as an historical formation in which economic patterns are decisive. Socialist feminists claim

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that the liberation of women would require a fundamental transformation of the patriarchal capitalist order. For this neither subversion nor escape is sufﬁcient. Beyond their disagreement about the nature of oppression and liberation, however, radical and socialist feminists agree in regarding women’s oppression as systemic. Like Adorno, they think the system’s oppressive features permeate society as a whole, including the ways in which culture is produced and distributed. Where they differ from Adorno is in their understanding of which class is oppressed, how that oppression operates, and how it could be overcome—and how ‘‘the culture industry’’ ﬁgures in all this.10 Because of those differences, radical and socialist feminists tend to reject the idea of aesthetic autonomy that Adorno seems to endorse. Given both Adorno’s proximity to radical and socialist feminist social theory and the risks of rejecting aesthetic autonomy, one wonders whether elements of Adorno’s aesthetic autonomism are worth salvaging for a feminist cultural politics that is informed by a systemic critique of society as a whole. More speciﬁcally, would a critical retrieval of insights from Adorno’s autonomist critique of the culture industry provide ways for feminists to address Devereaux’s concerns without giving up legitimate criticisms of aesthetic autonomy’s exclusionary content and consequences?

Adorno’s Critique of the Culture Industry
A ﬁrst step toward addressing this question is to show that Adorno’s idea of aesthetic autonomy is more complex than the idea that radical and socialist feminists reject. His critique of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment uses Marx’s dialectic of the commodity to rework eighteenth-century Enlightenment aesthetics.11 Central to Adorno’s critique, although barely thematized in the book itself, is the understanding of aesthetic autonomy captured in Kant’s description of the beautiful as ¨ purposiveness without purpose (Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck). Adorno translates this description into a complex conception of autonomy with wide-ranging social implications. On Adorno’s conception, purposiveness without purpose would both require and promote three forms of autonomy that are closely linked: (1) the internal and self-critical indepen-

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dence of the authentic work of art, (2) the relative independence of (some of) high culture from the political and economic system, and (3) the autonomy of the self as a political and moral agent. I shall label these three forms internal, societal, and personal autonomy, respectively. Adorno criticizes the culture industry for undermining all three types of autonomy. In subsequent writings he portrays authentic works of modern art as providing crucial resistance to pressures toward cultural commodiﬁcation and social narcissism. As this preliminary description suggests, although Adorno emphasizes ‘‘aesthetic autonomy,’’ the version he emphasizes is more complex and dialectical than the idea many feminists reject. To begin with, Adorno’s concept of the artwork’s internal autonomy is substantial rather than merely formal. Authentic works of art have an internal dialectic of content and form, he says, and this dialectic expresses the contradictions of society as whole. Moreover, in carrying out a dialectic of content and form, authentic works challenge their own self-constitution and thereby challenge the society that makes them possible. They force people to confront society’s unresolved tensions, and they point toward resolutions that artworks themselves cannot accomplish. Adorno also links substantial internal autonomy to a societal autonomy that is itself dialectical. On his account, the relative independence some art has achieved in capitalist societies is itself dependent on political and economic developments that he strongly criticizes. So Adorno does not simply celebrate art’s societal autonomy, nor does he regard it as ideologically neutral. Although societal autonomy makes possible a crucial mode of social criticism and utopian memory, it also reﬂects a class-based division of labor that Adorno rejects. Where he goes wrong, as I have argued elsewhere, is in making internal and societal autonomy a precondition for art’s social-critical capacities.12 In effect this rules out most forms of folk art, popular art, mass art, and site-speciﬁc art as potential locations of social criticism. Such sites include many forms of art making that feminist historians have retrieved and feminist artists have promoted. The other problem with Adorno’s dialectical autonomism is that it discounts the entwinement of autonomous art with other social institutions. As many feminists have shown, autonomous art is not as independent from the culture industry and other social institutions as Adorno’s language sometimes suggests. Although a distinction can be made out between autonomous art and other forms of cultural production, this distinction is not ﬁxed, nor is it the crucial one

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for sorting out the social-critical capacities of speciﬁc cultural phenomena. But this argument does not go sufﬁciently far to get at the problems in Adorno’s critique of the culture industry. It does not sufﬁce to argue, as I did, that autonomy is not a precondition for art’s social-critical capacities. Nor does it sufﬁce to argue, as Deborah Cook does, that some products of the culture industry might be capable of the sort of internal autonomy that Adorno reserved for authentic works of modern art.13 The problems in Adorno’s critique of the culture industry do not arise simply from the way he reserves internal autonomy for certain works of high art. Rather, they arise from how he connects such internal autonomy with both the societal autonomy of art and the personal autonomy of political and moral agents.14 These connections must be reexamined, along with the idea of autonomy that allows the connections to be posited in the ﬁrst place. Of particular importance for feminist criticisms of aesthetic autonomy is the connection between internal and societal autonomy. Let’s consider, then, how Adorno’s critique of the culture industry accounts for art’s societal autonomy and implicitly connects this with the internal autonomy of certain artworks. Dialectic of Enlightenment lays this out in two passages, which Cook also cites.15 In the ﬁrst passage Adorno argues that the culture industry ‘‘proves to be the goal of . . . liberalism’’ both culturally and politically (de, 104–6; da, 156–59). The argument compares developments in the United States with ones in Germany. Whereas the United States, with its more democratic culture and polity, led the way toward ‘‘the monopoly of culture,’’ the failure of democratic ‘‘Kontrolle’’ to permeate life in Germany exempted leading universities, theaters, and museums from market mechanisms: protection by local and state governments gave them a measure of freedom from commercial domination. At the same time, the market for literature and published music could rely on the purchasing power of homage paid to an unfashionable artistic quality. What really does contemporary artists in, says Adorno, is the pressure to blend into commercial life as ‘‘aesthetic experts.’’ They gain freedom from political domination only to become slaves of a ‘‘private monopoly of culture’’ in which the imposed tastes of the defrauded masses keep artists in their place. Pre-Fascist Europe, by contrast, lagged behind the trend toward culture monopoly, and this lag left ‘‘a remnant of autonomy’’ for intellectual activity (Geist). In other words, whatever societal autonomy the arts enjoyed in pre-Fascist Europe was a function of less-than-democratic political arrangements.

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There are two obvious problems with this explanation. First, it does not explain the societal autonomy of the arts in the United States, where the development of democratic forms of polity coincides historically with the institutionalization of autonomous art. Although Adorno quotes Alexis de Tocqueville to negative effect in this passage, he never takes up Tocqueville’s discussion of the voluntary associations that spawned intellectual activity in the United States when Germany still relied on state protection and control of culture. Yet one cannot simply ignore the prominence of voluntary associations in American culture, and their relative weakness in Germany, when one explains the social history of autonomous art and its relation to the culture industry. Local music societies, women’s literary clubs, and philanthropically funded art museums did not disappear with the rise of mass media in the United States. Instead, they ﬂourished and multiplied, even during the years when Nazis seized control of state-protected cultural organizations in Germany. To describe the American scene as a ‘‘culture monopoly,’’ as Adorno does, is to ignore the crucial role played by such noncommercial and nongovernmental organizations. The other problem with Adorno’s account is that it fails to explain why Hitler and his henchmen would attack not only the state-protected institutions of education, scholarship, and art but also the commercial institutions of mass culture. Surely the Nazis found some threat and resistance there, and not simply the ‘‘conformism’’ Adorno associates with the culture industry. Apart from vague appeals to the fact that consumers are not completely duped by the culture industry, Adorno does not explore the critical and subversive tendencies inherent to culture-industrial production, as distinct from particular products of such production. Nor is this surprising, since Adorno’s approach largely precludes the ‘‘truth potential’’ of art that does not ﬁt his models of internal and societal autonomy. The second passage occurs in a section on the ‘‘pseudoindividuality’’ said to prevail in the culture industry (de, 124–31; da, 181–89). Here Adorno argues that the culture industry involves a change in the commodity character of art, such that art’s commodity character is deliberately acknowledged and art ‘‘abjures its autonomy’’ (de, 127; da, 184). Art’s autonomy was always ‘‘essentially conditioned by the commodity economy,’’ says Adorno, even when autonomy took the form of negating ¨ social utility (gesellschaftliche Zweckmassigkeit—literally, ‘‘societal purposiveness’’). Internally autonomous works—works that ‘‘negated the com-

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modity character of society by simply following their own inherent laws’’—were still commodities. Adorno claims that their purposelessness was sustained by ‘‘the anonymity of the market,’’ whose demands are so diversely mediated that the market partially frees the artist from speciﬁc requirements (de, 127; da, 184). He acknowledges, of course, that the artist’s market-mediated freedom is also a ‘‘freedom to starve’’ (de, 104; da, 157) and contains an element of untruth. Yet the proper way for artists to counter this untruth, he says, is neither to deny nor to ﬂaunt the commodity character of art, but to assimilate the contradiction between market and autonomy ‘‘into the consciousness of their own production’’ (de, 127; da, 185). The culture industry, by contrast, dispenses entirely with the ‘‘purposelessness’’ that is central to art’s autonomy. Once the demand that art be marketable (Verwertbarkeit) becomes total, the internal economic structure of cultural commodities shifts.16 Instead of promising freedom from societally dictated uses, and thereby having a genuine use value that people can enjoy, the product mediated by the culture industry has its use value replaced by exchange value: [E]njoyment is giving way to being there and being in the know, connoisseurship by enhanced prestige. . . . Everything is perceived only from the point of view that it can serve as something else. . . . Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation ¨ [gesellschaftliche Schatzung] which they mistake for the merit [Rang] of works of art—becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy. (de, 128; da, 186) Hence the culture industry dissolves the ‘‘genuine commodity character’’ that artworks once possessed when exchange value developed use value as its own precondition and did not drag use value along as a ‘‘mere appendage’’ (de, 129–30; da, 188). In this second passage, then, the societal autonomy of art depends on the functioning of a capitalist market prior to the development of monopolistic tendencies. If Adorno were entirely consistent with this analysis, he should have concluded that economic preconditions for the societal autonomy of art had disappeared by the time he wrote his critique of the culture industry, and long before he began writing his Aes-

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thetic Theory. But that conclusion would contradict the way in which he pits modern art against the culture industry, and it would make his critique of the culture industry reactionary and inconsistent with the progressive impulses of his social theory.17 Nevertheless, Adorno’s critique has made an innovative and productive move, namely, to interpret Kant’s notion of aesthetic autonomy through an updated reading of Marx’s dialectic of the commodity, such that questions of internal and societal autonomy become inextricably linked. Too many of Adorno’s Anglo-American critics, in their desire to secure legitimacy for ‘‘mass art’’ or ‘‘mass culture,’’ overlook this move. They prefer instead to criticize Adorno for misconstruing ‘‘Kant’s analysis of free beauty as a theory of art’’18 or for not understanding genre-speciﬁc characteristics such as the importance of individual performance in jazz and the salience of collaborative recordings in rock.19 In effect, these critics suggest that Adorno did not really understand American ‘‘popular culture’’ and illicitly measured it by the standards of European bourgeois art. Such criticisms, while interesting in their own right, sidestep the challenge Adorno’s idea of autonomy poses for politically inﬂected theories of contemporary culture.20 The criticisms do not consider how culture and economy intersect, or what this intersection means for emancipatory politics. Feminists, however, cannot afford to ignore Adorno’s challenge.

Autonomy Reconﬁgured
Earlier I mentioned Mary Devereaux’s concern that feminist critiques of aesthetic autonomy might undermine the ‘‘protected space’’ required for feminist cultural politics. By itself, Adorno’s critique of the culture industry would not help resolve this dilemma. His critique includes a concept of internal autonomy not unlike the notion of aesthetic autonomy that many feminists reject. Yet feminists need to take up the larger challenge of Adorno’s complex idea of autonomy, namely, to develop a critical theory of the systemic roles fulﬁlled by culture in contemporary society. A ﬁrst step in that direction would be to revisit Adorno’s claims concerning the internal economic structure of cultural commodities. On the one hand, his analysis illuminates the essential role of hypercommercialization in contemporary Western societies. Whether homespun or eso-

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teric, whether radical or timid, no cultural good is protected from the juggernaut of consumer capitalism and the hegemony it secures. On the other hand, Adorno’s analysis has an unfortunate consequence: it portrays many cultural goods as no more than hypercommodities whose exchange value has replaced their use value. This portrait is unfortunate because it inadvertently endorses the tendency toward hypercommercialization that Adorno opposes. He fails to acknowledge sufﬁciently that taking pleasure in exchange value is not the sole function of cultureindustrial transactions—despite the ‘‘art is business’’ mentality of production and distribution companies, and despite the ‘‘I know what I like’’ self-understanding of culture ‘‘consumers.’’21 Of course, one can hardly deny that, under consumer capitalist conditions, cultural producers sell exchange values as use values and consumers buy them to be hip and fashionable. Simultaneously, however, and unavoidably, they also engage in cultural practices mediated by cultural goods. The ‘‘value’’ of these practices and goods cannot be subsumed under the economic categories of use value and exchange value. Accordingly, contemporary feminist social theory must ask how hypercommercialization either enhances or undermines such cultural practices, in which respects, and to what effect. One’s answer would indicate what, beyond offering a critique of consumer capitalism, an appropriate cultural politics would be. Because these matters are difﬁcult to sort out, I cannot pretend to give satisfactory answers in a single chapter. But let me outline an approach that could prove fruitful for feminist cultural politics. Russell Keat has argued that cultural activities such as broadcasting, the arts, and academic research, and ‘‘the institutions within which they are conducted, should be ‘protected’ in various ways from the operation of the market.’’22 Keat’s argument is an economic counterpart to Mary Devereaux’s political argument that the arts need a ‘‘protected space,’’ by which she means, primarily, a space protected from censorship and other forms of ‘‘political interference.’’ While acknowledging the point to both arguments, I would add that adequate political protection requires adequate economic protection, and vice versa. More important, I would also claim that protection is not enough: structural alternatives to the dominant economy and the dominant political system are required. Why do such cultural activities need protection from both ‘‘political interference’’ and the ‘‘operation of the market’’? The reason is that in contemporary Western societies a legitimate differentiation of cultural

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and societal spheres has occurred in tandem with an illegitimate colonization of ordinary life and cultural institutions by both corporate and governmental systems.23 These systems mutually reinforce each other’s dominance and, in doing so, they reinforce patriarchal patterns in culture. That is why political protection without economic protection, or vice versa, usually proves inadequate. Moreover, mere protection, accompanied perhaps by appeals to the intrinsic worth of education or research or the arts or entertainment, is not sufﬁcient to resist pressures toward hypercommercialization and performance fetishism. Certainly, to thrive, such cultural activities need to have economically and politically ‘‘protected spaces.’’ If the spaces are themselves created by the corporate economy or state agencies or are overly dependent on these entities, however, then the activities conducted within them remain subservient to corporate or state dictates and ruled by the systemic logics of money and power. Hence, as radical feminists have seen more clearly than most, countereconomic and counterpolitical spaces need to emerge from cultural activities and cultural agents themselves. That means setting up and strengthening organizations, media, and social networks whose economy is noncommercial and whose public voice is not state sanctioned. Such spaces are not simply a ‘‘counterculture’’ that would be noneconomic or apolitical. A countereconomy is deﬁnitely an economy, but it operates on noncommercial principles, whether nonproﬁt, cooperative, or communal. So too, a counterpolitics is deﬁnitely political, but it is not simply caught up in lobbying, party politics, and occupying legislative, administrative, or judicial positions of power. Even if the long-term goal were to break the dominance of corporate and state systems, as it seems to be in the ‘‘antiglobalization’’ movement, fostering countereconomic and counterpolitical spaces would still be internally important and externally necessary; internally important because otherwise the colonization of culture faces little resistance, externally necessary because there is hardly any other way to mobilize economic and political opposition to systems wielding enormous clout, with oppressive results. As Adorno’s linking of internal and societal autonomy suggests, countereconomic and counterpolitical spaces must foster intrinsically worthwhile cultural practices. This applies to the arts just as much as it applies to education and research.24 Perhaps a suitably expanded concept of ‘‘aesthetic value’’25 would provide a constructive alternative to Adorno’s analysis and help resolve the dilemma within feminism concerning aesthetic

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autonomy. By suitably expanded I mean two things. First, I mean a concept that does not restrict aesthetic merit to formal qualities of discrete art objects but encompasses the qualities of the practices in which people engage when they create and experience artistic products and events. Second, I mean a concept of aesthetic merit that does not restrict the relevant practices to those typical of high art but ranges over popular art, mass art, and site-speciﬁc art as well. I have described this concept elsewhere as ‘‘imaginative cogency.’’26 Imaginative cogency is an horizon of expectations governing the intersubjective exploration, presentation, and interpretation of aesthetic signs. Within this horizon art products and art events are expected to elicit and sustain open-ended exploration, to present multiple and unexpected nuances of meaning, and to lend themselves to creative interpretation. And these processes are expected to occur with degrees of complexity, depth, and intensity that are both appropriate to the particular products and events and intrinsically worthwhile. The concept of imaginative cogency helps articulate a notion of aesthetic autonomy that neither privileges authentic works of modern art ` nor construes aesthetic autonomy as a last bastion of social critique, a la Adorno. But it also resists either reducing aesthetic merit to the outcome of struggles for power or treating aesthetic autonomy as a merely strategic concern, in the manner of some feminists. On the approach I propose, the central normative question concerning aesthetic autonomy would be which contemporary art practices are better able, given a certain context and situation, to ‘‘generate creative and critical dialogue via production of and participation in events, products, and experiences that are multifaceted, innovative, and attuned to current needs.’’ Accordingly, concerns about aesthetic autonomy would shift ‘‘from works as such to the quality of the practices in which artists and their collaborators and publics engage.’’27 There is nothing in this notion of aesthetic autonomy to preclude its application to popular, mass, and site-speciﬁc art. Yet it retains a critical edge and does not simply become a classiﬁcatory category.28 In fact, it derives in large part from collaborative and interventionist art practices pioneered by feminists artists such as Judy Chicago and Judith Baca.29 Given this critical hermeneutic notion of aesthetic autonomy, one can also ask which institutional patterns and societal structures are more likely to foster the sorts of practices in which imaginative cogency can be pursued. This question can be made more speciﬁc to feminist struggles for justice and recognition that include the creation and experience of

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art.30 Since such questions are partly empirical, one cannot settle them in theory, no more than in theory Adorno could legitimately declare all products of the culture industry worthless, and no more than in theory a feminist can legitimately declare all aesthetic criteria to be simply ideological. Yet there is one respect in which a theoretical answer needs to be attempted. This has to do with the relationships between economy, polity, and culture that Adorno makes central to his own critique of the culture industry. In the two passages I discussed, Adorno depicts the societal autonomy of the arts as the function, historically, of a paternalist state and premonopolistic capitalism. Although understandable both as a reﬂection of Adorno’s own European experience and as an articulation of his background theory of state capitalism, such an account of societal autonomy misses a crucial feature of cultural politics and cultural economics in the United States. I mentioned earlier his failure to take up Tocqueville’s discussion of voluntary associations in the United States. This is doubly unfortunate. Not only did these types of organizations resist the grid of the capitalist market in either its entrepreneurial or its monopolistic stages, but also they have provided alternative sites for the development of cultural practices outside the strict conﬁnes of church, state, and other institutions of control. Freestanding schools, music societies, libraries, and literary clubs, many of them founded or led by women, may have had as much impact as did the capitalist market on the development of culture in the United States. This is not to suggest that cultural organizations have a more decisive role in the development of culture than economic forces have. Nor is it to suggest that such sites were completely independent of class interests, patriarchal patterns, and a capitalist economy. Rather, the type of economy that helped give rise to twentiethcentury American culture cannot be captured in either a simple market model or the model of state capitalism that informs Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is a three-sector economy, and it includes a voluntary component that mediates the development of cultural practices.31 If this series of hypotheses is on the right track, then the account to be given of the societal autonomy of art must go beyond Adorno’s theses about the political backwardness of pre-Fascist Europe and the commodity character of artistic products. It needs to incorporate the role of civil society and public spheres, not only historically but also today. That, ironically, is the missing link both in the Kantian account of ‘‘ﬁne art’’ ¨ (schone Kunst) and in Adorno’s Marx-inﬂected usage of Kantian notions

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to critique the culture industry—ironically, because, if Habermas is right in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the rise of ﬁne art as an autonomous social institution in eighteenth-century Europe is itself intimately entwined with the development of a relatively independent bourgeois public sphere.32 As historians such as Joan Landes have shown, contemporary feminism must consider whether such institutionalizations are irreversibly bound to the masculinist structures in which they ﬁrst emerged, or whether, through concerted counterhegemonic effort, they have become and can become sites of opposition and transformation.33 For such effort to succeed, countereconomic forces are required. Habermas himself does not consider the alternative economic underpinnings of some public spheres, and in this he remains too close to Adorno’s critique of the culture industry.34 That has not escaped the attention of feminists who incorporate Habermas’s emphasis on public spheres but who see that a feminist cultural politics might require countereconomic structures. Rita Felski, for example, partially recognizes the need for alternative economic support to a ‘‘feminist counter-public sphere.’’ Yet she remains ambivalent about the prospects for developing such support, and she envisions the feminist counterpublic sphere as operating through ‘‘a series of cultural strategies’’ both internal and external to ‘‘existing institutional structures.’’35 This raises a problem, it seems to me. Existing institutional structures such as ‘‘the educational system’’ are just as vulnerable to hypercommercialization and performance fetishism as are cultural strategies external to them. While I understand why Felski rejects Adorno’s supposed ‘‘privileging of a modernist aesthetic as a site of freedom’’ and questions his apparent ‘‘diagnosis of the modern world as a totally administered society with no possibility of genuine opposition or dissent,’’ I do not see how a feminist counterpublic sphere would escape Adorno’s diagnosis if it did not actually have countereconomic support.36 So, although indebted to Felski’s pioneering work, my response to Adorno’s critique of the culture industry takes a different tack. I argue, against Adorno, that the societal autonomy of art depends on a number of interrelated social factors. While structural shifts in the dominant economy and polity have signiﬁcant implications for the autonomy of art, they are linked to noncommercial and nongovernmental developments that also inform structural shifts in the dominant economy and polity. The twentieth-century shift from monopoly capitalism to consumer capitalism, for example, may well go hand in hand with the development of

And. resist systemic colonization. can foster a more dialogical type of personal autonomy characterized by creative coresponsibility. the conﬂict in feminism between strategically appealing to aesthetic autonomy and theoretically rejecting it would dissolve. It would dissolve into the idea of autonomy as a multidimensional condition to be fashioned and won.38 This account would have three outcomes. Negativity. Accordingly. An account along these lines would not assume that ‘‘purposiveness without purpose’’ was deﬁnitive of ﬁne art in Kant’s own day. the account would make more of the ‘‘communicability’’ and ‘‘sociability’’ that Kant links with aesthetic judgment. not only in North America but also around the world. ever anew. my own alternative to Adorno’s idea of autonomy involves three steps. Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy suppl. third. ‘‘Autonomy. by virtue of their political and economic positioning. Here and throughout the chapter I use the term aesthetic autonomy loosely to cover what I have more carefully distinguished as aesthetic autonomy and artistic autonomy in Lambert Zuidervaart. First I replace the notion of a work’s internal autonomy with a notion of the autonomy of certain cultural practices. Instead. Finally. nor that the current prospects for autonomous art depend primarily upon aesthetic qualities internal to the work of art. and with a proliferation of cultural organizations whose third-sector economy need not turn products into hypercommodities. as made possible by certain institutions.272
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new public spheres where struggles for recognition and justice exceed the boundaries of state-sanctioned discourse. (1999):
. First. in struggles for recognition and justice. the blunt causal assumptions of Adorno’s critique of the culture industry would give way to a more textured diagnostic model. I indicate how certain practices. in other publications. and Illusory Transgression: Menke’s Deconstruction of Adorno’s Aesthetics.’’ Philosophy Today. the question of whether culture-industrial products can have emancipatory potential would turn into the question of whether cultural organizations can be fashioned where cultural products of many sorts can be taken up in autonomous cultural practices within organizations that. Second. Then I revise Adorno’s political and economic account of art’s societal autonomy.37 It would also explore the matrix of civil society and third-sector economy that gives birth to diverse forms of cultural creation.39
Notes
1.

ﬁlm studies. 1998). Paul Guyer. The Culture Industry Revisited. Of these. 128 and the related note on de. Revisions introduced into the text before it was published in 1947 disguise the fact that Adorno and Horkheimer are employing the analysis of the commodity worked out by Karl Marx in Das Kapital. See also Deborah Cook. one must either abandon the notion that this internal autonomy is somehow linked to economic conditions or provide a different account of those economic conditions than Adorno himself provides. 182–87. Cook suggests that perhaps ‘‘some products of the culture industry already follow the model for cultural practice with political import which Adorno discovered in some works of high modern art’’ (129). 105. 107. 149–73. Habermas. and it is hardly reassuring with regard to prospects for the societal autonomy of high art. The ﬁrst option requires one to give up Adorno’s dialectical interpolations of culture and economy.’’ It is this revised version which has been translated into English and widely anthologized. Such revisions have helped shield Adorno’s Anglo-American readers from the economic claims that support his critique of the culture industry.’’ See de. Adorno. For she adopts. ed. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (London: I. 14. This casts doubt on a Habermasian ‘‘faith in [the] vitality of civil society or the lifeworld’’ (39).274
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and Littleﬁeld. Deborah Cook notes the problem here. 20. 21. much less the societal autonomy of popular culture. I am not sure whether there is an inconsistency between her embrace here of Adorno’s general critique and her earlier attempt to rescue some culture-industrial products from Adornian dismissal. . Kant himself turns his analysis of free beauty into a theory of art. See sections 43–46 in Immanuel Kant. it seems to me. Deborah Cook demonstrates that Adorno’s general critique of late capitalism links the development of a stratiﬁed mass society with the spread of narcissism. The same avoidance occurs in Patrick Brantlinger’s highly inﬂuential interpretation of Adorno’s critique as an example of ‘‘negative classicism. history. she argues. The second option. Here Cook is more faithful to Adorno than I consider warranted. 271. . 18. Such products would have to achieve ‘‘a degree of autonomy’’ that allows them to ‘‘break the stranglehold of reiﬁcation and . but she does not seem to feel its full weight.: Cornell University Press. Tauris. If one wants to argue as Cook does for the internal autonomy of artworks and of certain products of the culture industry. narcissism. 16. N. 1983). Noel Carroll. 2004). is also more difﬁcult. In The Culture Industry Revisited. Theodore Gracyk. although less problematic from a critical theory perspective.Y. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 185. ‘‘a shift in the composition of cultural commodities in terms of use value and exchange value. and (3) the psychological dispositions of the artist. I
. 2000). She ﬁnds three ‘‘extrinsic conditions’’ for modern art’s autonomy in Adorno’s writings: (1) a cultural lag behind the culture industry. namely. A Philosophy of Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press. In ‘‘Adorno on Mass Societies. (2) the advancement of artistic techniques. It is curious that Carroll does not discuss Kant’s own attempt to distinguish between ‘‘ﬁne art’’ and ‘‘agreeable arts’’ where. B. 1996).’’ Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (Spring 2001): 35–52. and the Search for a Rational Society (New York: Routledge. only the ﬁrst is mildly economic. holding out the promise of independent forms of communication between more rationally and instinctually robust individuals’’ (128). the phrase ‘‘a shift in the inner economic composition of cultural commodities’’ substitutes for what would have been more clearly in line with Marx’s analysis. without serious challenge.’’ In the English translation. 15. then. trans. A similar obscuring of Adorno’s Marxian categories occurs in the revised version of his essay ‘‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.’’ in Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca. Where the 1947 and subsequent editions mention ‘‘eine Verschiebung in der inneren okonomischen Zusammensetzung der Kulturwaren. 1996). 19. and musicology. Together with several colleagues in communications. Cook. the concept of internal autonomy that underlies Adorno’s critique.’’ the 1944 version more straightforwardly points ¨ to ‘‘eine Verschiebung in der Zusammensetzung der Kulturwaren nach Gebrauchswert und Tauschwert. Critique of the Power of Judgment. 17. da.

Zuidervaart. 1995). By performance fetishism I mean a tendency toward internal bureaucratization of cultural organizations in response to a government demand for administratively manageable certiﬁcation of competence and output. 15–39. Examples include moves to ‘‘retool’’ school curricula and pedagogies for the sake of competitiveness in the global economy and to ‘‘rationalize’’ arts organizations in accord with cost/beneﬁt criteria. Community and Cultural Democracy. Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (London: Macmillan Press. 29.’’ in The Arts. ‘‘Autonomy. 31. where I introduce the concepts of hypercommercialization and performance fetishism.. Brand argues that philosophical aesthetics needs to move away from ‘‘the rigidity of the traditional aesthetic-nonaesthetic distinction and toward a revised notion . The main lines of this answer stem from the diagnosis of modernization in Jurgen Habermas. The switch since the 1970s from mostly state funding to increasing amounts of corporate funding is simply a shift within a paradigm that hinders genuine academic freedom.’’ as both serving ‘‘the ever more effective simulation of presence’’ and birthing ‘‘a postmodern culture of difference’’ (73). of aesthetic value’’ (260). for example. 22. Walhout (London: Macmillan Press. ix. 56 (Spring–Summer 1992): 43–73. See Fraser. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press.’’ such as oppressed groups constituted along the lines of either race or gender. government.: Eerdmans. I explore the relevance of this diagnosis for the arts in ‘‘Postmodern Arts and the Birth of a Democratic Culture. Martin’s Press. and ‘‘independent’’
. in moves to ‘‘privatize’’ state-funded schooling and to market the economic beneﬁts of arts organizations. Negativity. 1991).’’ in Literature and the Renewal of the Public Sphere. Kracauer. Martin’s Press. 1987).S. 11–39. Lambert Zuidervaart. economy are the corporate. no. 245–72. 2 vols. The three sectors of the U. 2000). This tendency comes with a full-scale celebration of exchange value that makes it increasingly difﬁcult to raise and address questions of cultural need and cultural norms. By hypercommercialization I mean a tendency to make commercial potential the primary or sole reason for building and maintaining cultural organizations. .’’ 165. and Illusory Transgression. 206–24. ed. Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market (London: Macmillan Press. 1984. 23. ‘‘Revising the Aesthetic-Nonaesthetic Distinction: The Aesthetic Value of Activist Art. Derrida. ed. My proposal differs from Brand’s in emphasizing cultural practices rather than artworks. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. See Lambert Zuidervaart. 28. 25. Here I take a cue from Peggy Zeglin Brand. This approach has afﬁnities with Miriam Hansen’s attempt to think through Adorno’s writings on ﬁlm and mass culture in ‘‘Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno. ‘‘Cultural Paths and Aesthetic Signs: A Critical Hermeneutics of Aesthetic Validity. Russell Keat. 2000). ‘‘Creative Border Crossing in New Public Culture.’’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (2003): 315–40.’’ New German Critique. 26. 27. 1997). and the Electronic Media. . In my book Artistic Truth I elaborate the implications of ‘‘imaginative cogency’’ for art’s critical and utopian capacities. ed. Susan VanZanten Gallagher and Mark D. But her essay does not address the connection of this vision to emancipatory politics. trans. ed. Hansen tries to mobilize ‘‘the split ´ between mass-cultural script and modernist ecriture’’ into ‘‘a stereoscopic vision that spans the extremes of contemporary media culture. 24. New York: St.Feminist Politics and the Culture Industry
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explore other functions of culture-industrial transactions in Dancing in the Dark: Youth. The relationship between struggles for economic justice and struggles for cultural recognition is especially crucial for the emancipation of what Nancy Fraser calls ‘‘bivalent collectivities. 2000).’’ in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics. Roy Anker (Grand Rapids. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reﬂections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (New York: Routledge. with the result that strategic calculations take precedence over their cultural missions. Martin’s Press. 30. Popular Culture. as seen. Mich. Too many politically inﬂected theories of culture ignore just how meshed universities have become with the dominant economic and political systems and just how vulnerable this makes research and education to corporate and state dictates. ¨ The Theory of Communicative Action. New York: St. New York: St.

Craig Calhoun (Cambridge. 34. 163. Habermas revisits these topics in ‘‘Concluding Remarks’’ and ‘‘Further Reﬂections on the Public Sphere. of course. 462–79 and 421–61. At the same time. Rita Felski. 1996). 37. For a shorter account of this attempt to go ‘‘beyond feminist aesthetics. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox. a postanalytic and a postfeminist aesthetics)’’ in Joseph Margolis. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Boston. Did the arts achieve societal autonomy because market forces replaced court and church patronage? Or did market forces replace patronage in the arts because participants in the arts were seeking societal autonomy? Did the arts in pre-Fascist Europe retain a measure of autonomy because they enjoyed state protection from monopolistic market forces? Or did the state protect the arts in Europe in order to retain societal dominance over against monopolistic market forces? All these lines of inquiry are inadequate. theoretical simpliﬁcation and abstraction can yield an account rich in explanatory potential. 1989).
. See especially Joan B. sections 39–41. Waugh’s ‘‘Analytic Aesthetics and Feminist Aesthetics: Neither/Nor?’’ in the same volume. I elaborate this alternative and explore its implications for public policy in a book manuscript provisionally titled ‘‘Art-in-Public: Politics. For a brief summary. see Jurgen Habermas. ed.’’ in Habermas and the Public Sphere.’’ see Rita Felski. Margolis’s essay responds to Joann B. 1989). 1995). August 1998. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category ¨ of Bourgeois Society (1962). Economics. 171–78. Jurgen Habermas. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.: Harvard University Press. See also the chapter ‘‘Civil Society and the Political Public Sphere’’ in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. pp.’’ in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics. Landes. Mass. and a Democratic Culture. Mass.’’ in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics. I have discussed the shortcomings of standard economic theories of the third sector in an unpublished paper titled ‘‘Short Circuits and Market Failure: Theories of the Civic Sector. since they assume a single direction of causality and leave out many other potentially relevant factors. 38. New German Critique 1 (Fall 1974): 49–55. 1995). Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge.: MIT Press.’’ 39. Mass.’’ trans. See Kant.: MIT Press. 35. 171. trans. Perhaps this idea of autonomy would be a social-philosophical counterpart to the attempt ‘‘to explore the possibilities of a post-structuralist aesthetics (hence. and even more tricky to include enough of the relevant factors.Y. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. 33.276
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or ‘‘third’’ sectors. respectively. Part of the problem is that Adorno’s theses tend to be monocausal. 329–87. 1992). N. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.: Cornell University Press. 399–415. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge. ‘‘Why Feminism Doesn’t Need an Aesthetic (and Why It Can’t Ignore Aesthetics).: MIT Press. 431–45. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca. Felski. It is always tricky to sort out causes from effects in social-theoretical and historical explanations. Mass.’’ presented at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. ‘‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia ¨ Article (1964). ed. William Rehg (Cambridge. 1988). 36. ‘‘Reconciling Analytic and Feminist Philosophy and Aesthetics. 416–30. ed. 32. trans.

He describes the culture industry as a schema through which
. spiritual. Taken together. take political. Suffering. Eagan
A key problem in feminist ethics is how women can extricate themselves from the forces that have determined how they live their lives.13
Unfreedom. broadly characterized as the sex/gender system. if a feminist ethics is to be possible. and the Culture Industry
What Adorno Can Contribute to a Feminist Ethics
Jennifer L. These constraints. The philosophy of Theodor Adorno is an as yet untapped resource for thinking about such constraints on thought and possibilities. psychological. and cultural forms. there must be a way to act and think beyond the strictures of the sex/gender system. these constraints constitute a matrix of perception and a limitation on thought that is nearly impossible to see beyond. However.

I argue that suffering is constituted by speciﬁc social contexts. However.’’2 In other words. while acknowledging that we never fully escape our gendered culture. Next. He advocates aesthetic expression as the last best hope for thinking beyond what is readily available. culture. and (4) art can give suffering meaning by revealing its social context. (3) the experience of living one’s gender is a particular example of suffering. These themes are already present in feminist theory in the work of Judith Butler. and claim that gender is a part of that schema. a necessary and ﬁxed lens of perception that makes reality intelligible to us. and our capacity to critique is diminished. immanent critique. I discuss cultural ideology as a schema. as long as the latter remains unreconciled to the former. imagination. Here. I brieﬂy deﬁne Adorno’s concepts of culture. I examine the intersections of suffering and culture as these ideas appear in the works of Adorno and Butler. Within this exploration. In this chapter. ‘‘Culture is the perennial claim of the particular over the general. ideology. I develop Adorno’s notion of suffering as a mode of unfreedom and with Butler examine gender as a particular instantiation of suffering. and political thought. Adorno and Butler address concrete social and cultural realties that show how difﬁcult this goal is. Second.
Culture and Ideology in Adorno
Adorno’s reading of culture shows both the promise and pitfalls of cultural expression and production. Although some may want to posit wholesale freedom from constraint as a clear-cut goal of feminist ethics. though its critical capacity is diminished by cultural ideology. should express individuality in contrast to the status quo. the culture industry. I examine the problem of freedom and unfreedom in Adorno’s work and show how his perspective can inform questions important to feminist ethics and praxis. and art.278
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thought.
. Culture for Adorno can have many meanings. Her ethics advocates disruptive styles of living one’s gender. (2) suffering always takes place within social and cultural contexts. I argue that (1) all men and women experience unfreedom to varying degrees. Culture can be expressed through philosophy.1 First. for Adorno. music. among other vehicles. Butler sees gender itself as such a cultural schema through which our thought and possibilities become limited. art. Further exposing the contextual nature of suffering. He writes.

the remnant domain of freedom under capital in accordance with the same principles of exchange and equivalence that reign in the sphere of production outside leisure. which involves the production of works for reproduction and mass consumption. the creation of cultural products for mass consumption. Bernstein nicely encapsulates what Adorno means by the culture industry: ‘‘The culture industry. and individuality. Here. laid out for the consumption for the general. ‘‘Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classiﬁcation. the sphere of economic exchange where cultural products are bought and sold. Adorno claims that ideology no longer functions explicitly in the form of propaganda. as Adorno would say. Part of the danger of culture’s lapsing into the culture industry is that it creates a homogenizing schema whereby cultural products become ideology. The culture industry violates the second condition of the claim of culture. Culture can lapse into culture industry. Adorno is worried that the culture industry and the marketplace will become so totalizing as to altogether foreclose imaginative choices and possibilities beyond what is produced in this realm. J. it contains the potential to become subsumed back into the general. but is generated by a few who shape these choices though the marketplace.’’4 The culture industry is not generated by the choices of a majority of people. while laying false claims to particularity.5 Ideology can be countered by immanent critique. uniqueness. thereby organizing ‘free’ time. but has become embedded in social practices that have been reiterated and reenacted in social practice. However. a critique that appeals to social conditions and concrete experience while recognizing that any critique comes from within and is conditioned by that ideological perspective. M. The culture industry is the particular that has been reconciled to the general. presents culture as the realization of the right of all to the gratiﬁcation of desire while in reality continuing the negative integration of society. Culture as a critique of the status quo is always in jeopardy of being subsumed into that status quo. Suffering.’’6 Ideology tries to reduce the world to a series of brute facts that
.’’3 What is at one time an expression of individuality can become reiﬁed as a group perspective that shapes and homogenizes through the lens or schema of co-opted culture. Ideology for Adorno is the false story about what reality is that becomes reiterated until it is accepted as truth. and the Culture Industry
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because of the shared nature of culture. ideology becomes part of ‘‘the overwhelming power of existing conditions.Unfreedom.

the theses of determinism and freedom coincide. unlike a wholesale determinism. He claims that Kant mistakenly attacks this ‘‘pseudoproblem’’ in the
. Unfreedom is the conditioning of spontaneity by any social. cultural. we will need enough distance to launch a critique. If we have any hope for enacting our own freedom and creating change in the world. 219). as well as any meaningful response to suffering. Responding to Kant’s Third Antinomy on the unresolvability of the opposing possibilities of freedom and determinism. reducing the power of culture to generate a counterpoint to the status quo. not to be isolated.7 Culture and art contain the power to counter the culture industry and ideology. Adorno urges us to get beyond the abstract formulation of determinism by using the term unfreedom. rather.
The Puzzle of Freedom and Unfreedom
Serving as background to the possibility of any ethics. He performs this switch in order to infuse both the concepts of freedom and unfreedom with social reality. I examine Adorno’s view of freedom and how tenuous its potential is given certain social conditions. a historical node. Adorno elaborates his view of freedom by way of his critique of Kant. They are not antinomial. in a two-fold sense: it is entwined. but they also have the potential to lose their autonomy and be co-opted in the service of the status quo. Adorno holds out the greatest hope for art. but interwoven. 220). Although we might be tempted to conﬂate unfreedom and determinism. ‘‘Each drastic thesis is false. as something ‘‘that can speak for what is hidden by the veil’’ of ideology. the road to which is blocked under present conditions’’ (nd.280
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escape critique. We experience both (nd. Adorno deﬁnes freedom as ‘‘a moment. Therefore. unfreedom can occur in varying degrees. Unfreedom is what blocks this road to freedom. Adorno writes. stands Adorno’s dialectic of freedom and unfreedom that appears in Negative Dialectics. and for the time being it is never more than an instant of spontaneity. dependent upon each other and occurring simultaneously. or political factor. In their inmost core.’’8 Adorno would claim that freedom (Freiheit) and unfreedom (Unfreiheit) stand in a dialectical relationship to each other. In the following section. to be able to best counter ideology by creating new possibilities beyond the world as it is.

beyond this signifying word. Adorno appeals to psychoanalysis as an obvious ally. 239). ‘‘By the concept of the self we should properly mean their potential. ‘‘Freedom would be the word for the possibility of those impulses’’ (nd. Its mere assumption would be immoral. Both morality and the self change as social conditions change. makes the mistake of presuming moral certainty. Claiming it is more than a simple mistake.Unfreedom. but by a more genuine (though not perfect) judgment. Such moral certainty is beyond the ability of the empirical subject to discern. Suffering. An idealized will. freedom is nothing more than the experiences and impulses stemming from an empirical subject. that consciousness is transparent to itself. Kant presumes that the will is uniﬁed. or that they are at least responsible for their ability to respond to such conditions (nd. 26). Such a will would appeal to real empirical conditions in addition to reason in order to determine action. such as Kant’s. n. In looking to real conditions. we will look to empirical conditions surrounding the interaction between subject and world. and it falsely presumes that morality and the subject are static and unchanging. and that action can therefore always be guided by reason (nd. 212). What we ﬁnd when we look for freedom are the ways that social realities and psychological conditions create the empirical subject and constrain him or her in speciﬁc and predictable ways. 211–99).9 Adorno’s dialectical deﬁnition of the will would allow the subject to combat the forces of unfreedom by resisting any moral law that claims universality and serves as a socially imposed constraint. If we are going to ﬁnd freedom anywhere. the will would not be determined by law or by a preﬁgured social narrative. and this potential stands in polemical opposition
. Adorno contrasts this view with a physicalist account of freedom. To counter these notions. would falsely relieve the individual of anything that might be called morality’’ (nd. 243). and the Culture Industry
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Third Antinomy and in his ethics (nd. noumenal subject as the location of freedom. Adorno writes. ‘‘There is no moral certainty. This mistake of locating freedom within the subject stems from a misguided characterization of the subject. but he also proposes another version of the will. Existentialism likewise serves this poisonous political project by convincing people that they are responsible for the conditions that they are subjected to. one that is more compatible with an empirical subject. Adorno implicates Kant in his perpetuation of a bourgeois notion of freedom that reduces freedom to the interiority of the subject and therefore denies and forgives the real conditions that constitute unfreedom. Kant’s fundamental mistake is identifying the abstract.

and one that reveals our condition of unfreedom to us. I will examine suffering as a mode of unfreedom created by social conditions. and show that we do not move in a simply linear direction from unfreedom to freedom. such as the effects of the culture industry. physical individual—bears witness to the failure of history to realize itself in the unity of subject and object. in the form of liberation from oppressive social conditions. and he is worried that speciﬁc social conditions. In other words. suffering is a physical event that runs counterfactually to ideal categories of being. Next. This issue of freedom and unfreedom is obviously an important question for feminism. The oppressed thing—the object itself. The speciﬁc cultural ideology that Adorno is attacking in Negative Dialectics is the ideology of identity thinking. has never existed. the suffering. As Drucilla Cornell explains. Adorno provides us with a way to take the suffering of the physical individual seriously. 278).’’11 Perfect freedom. How is it possible for the oppressed to become liberated? How can women who are constructed in unfreedom attain a critical perspective from which to examine and possibly redeﬁne their situation? To what extent is something like liberation even possible? I speculate that Adorno’s dialectic between freedom and unfreedom can illustrate how feminists can move between these two poles. For Adorno. however.282
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to the reality of the self’’ (nd. As opposed to substantiality. or the metaphysics that attempts to subsume different things
. ‘‘The ethical signiﬁcance of the disjuncture between meaning and being reminds us that reconciliation cannot be imposed. without mediating it or lessening it with a ﬁctive freedom that is supposed to unify a transcendent subject-consciousness with a degraded body-object. which cannot be thought of apart from each other. Positing this ideal ignores these conditions. Adorno is interested in the possibility for freedom for real empirical subjects once unfreedom has taken hold. the empirical self is dynamic and alternating between the forces of freedom and unfreedom in a complex interplay of social and subjective forces. suffering proves cultural ideology wrong. will foreclose the meaningful experience of freedom in the future.10 Ultimately. freedom from such conditions is still our goal.
Suffering as a Mode of Unfreedom
Suffering is a particular variety of unfreedom.

that things should be different’’ (nd. ‘‘The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be.
. Ultimately. 203).12 This ideology has dominated Western philosophy and has been reiterated in different forms of idealism until particulars are degraded as unreal. suffering. As Adorno states. The problem with idealism is that it is unable to dwell with material reality. poverty. with a healthy dose of skepticism. is repackaged and sold back to us as universal. natural. and therefore beyond our control. For example. it is totalizing. in The Jargon of Authenticity. Although one cannot escape the fact that ideology creates and frames the suffering that one experiences. and war. 203). inevitable. What Adorno calls ‘‘the pure positivity of jargon’’ (or ideology) causes us to overlook pain and suffering with an attitude of ‘‘trustful reliance. and the Culture Industry
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and ideas under unitary concepts.’’13 This suffering. the bourgeois coldness that is only too willing to underwrite the inevitable.’’14 This attitude reinforces attachment to the ideology of universality despite evidence to the contrary. in Adorno’s terminology. The evidence against the ideology is not abstract. class. and death. adopting a physicalist interpretation of both events.Unfreedom. race. Suffering. what saves us from the totalizing power of ideology is our own immediate and subjective experience. idealism ‘‘comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death for the sake of a recollection occurring merely in reﬂection—in the last analysis. Adorno distinguishes suffering from happiness. and in this way it denies the human. thus reducing and trivializing particular instances of suffering. The experience of suffering (our own or the observation of others) shakes us out of our acceptance of the status quo. To create an alternative to identity thinking in his discussion of suffering. This universalist position on suffering would seem to imply that all people suffer in the same way. that experience can give us enough distance from ideology to question it from within. Adorno takes on existentialism as an ideology. Our experience informs immanent critique. He remarks that ‘‘the smallest trace of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all the identarian philosophy that would talk us out of that suffering’’ (nd. but comes from the empirical world and our own experience. which is the result of cultural and political conditions for which we are collectively responsible. for its valorizing the suffering that particular people experience as a universal and permanent feature of the human condition when this suffering is actually produced by political and historical conditions such as gender. of course. This type of thinking tends toward subsuming all particulars under one giant universal.

and cultural realities are ignored. Butler’s freedom. is dependent on the conditions of unfreedom and always under threat of disappearance because of these same conditions. Butler’s work. like Adorno’s. ‘‘How can gender be both a matter of choice and cultural construction?’’16 In her response. Butler sees the body as a culturally contested site where cultural contestations. I ﬁnd that the work of Judith Butler addresses this best. She asks the question. addresses the disjuncture between an ideal subject and the real conditions that such a subject faces. But. Her philosophy is not the story of a simple discursive reading of the body as a text. as Nussbaum. She explains that the choice about how to live one’s body. gender. and sexuality is not made from a distance. authenticity. political. although we will also need to examine how the material and biological are constructed through certain kinds of practices and discourse. and works to construct subjects and their bodies in certain ways. (universality. which create the necessarily sexed and gendered subject. obscures pain. she presents us with a version of Adorno’s unfreedom as a kind of conditioned freedom. This choice is conditioned by the culture that we ﬁnd ourselves in. ‘‘There is no self that is prior to the convergence of who maintains ‘integrity’ prior to its entrance into this conﬂicted cultural ﬁeld. but do not wholly determine him or her. The same is true in gender theory. she remembers that the body is not
. where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there. in her taking up of particular instances of suffering and injustice of both real and ﬁctional characters in her work. identity) without addressing the material. like Adorno’s. and others have claimed. This choice is an ethical one that becomes instantiated in the materiality of the body and is consistently played out in the gendered actions of the subject. but a more subtle set of practices that subjects are compelled to enact under threat of unspoken sanction. However.’’17 With Foucault. Bordo.15 Butler’s work. this body is not literally nothing. but is an interpretation of what is already culturally available. The body is not a text for Butler. freedom within certain socially constructed parameters.284
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We cannot simply idealize concepts such as the ones Adorno critiques. I reiterate. like Adorno’s. The power of this ideology is so potent that the body-subjects who enact and submit to this ideology would be nothing (culturally intelligible) without it. She shows how the ideology that enforces rigid gender roles is not just a discourse. There is only a taking up of tools where they lie. and events take place. This is how concrete social. identities. illustrates how ideology creates suffering. not the simple result of social conditioning.

Herculine tries to make sense of her suffering through the lens of the narratives available to her. 99). and. obviously. As Butler writes. and so do Christian legends about ill-fated saints. However. whose causes are environmental rather than just natural). Suffering. Social and political events constitute the causes of suffering. partially constituted by. 94). Butler reads Herculine’s eventual suicide as a result of her unintelligibility. Herculine comes to realize that she cannot. This is in part how suffering as a mode of unfreedom comes to our attention. Greek myths about suicidal androgynes. and this cannot be cleverly avoided by abstracting completely from that site. her suicide completes what her society has already accomplished. ‘‘Romantic and sentimental narratives of impossible loves seem also to produce all manner of suffering in this text. Suffering can be distinguished from pain in this way as a natural
. From Adorno and Butler. Herculine suffers as a result of the concrete social conditions that demand that she choose to live as one sex that conforms to a heterosexual cultural norm. famine or cancer. the discourse of gender ideology. The body is a site of someone’s speciﬁc suffering.18 Although the body is given meaning through. Butler. uses speciﬁc characters and examples. Instead of dwelling in happy ambiguity as Foucault claims. following Foucault. In this sense. to greater or lesser degrees) and. but unlike Foucault. the Christ ﬁgure itself’’ (gt. through the chasm between ideology and our own experience. Butler recognizes the presence of suffering for those of us in ‘‘gender trouble’’ (which is all of us. We see Herculine tell her own story through the lens of her own historical ideology. Butler takes seriously Herculine’s suffering as a result of this ﬁgure’s ambiguity and cultural unintelligibility. Foucault wants to romanticize this story as an example of how to live within and yet exceed gendered ideological borders. and on some level does not. but these seem to fail her in the end. this does not mean that the body is reducible to this text. There is no story that she could appeal to that ﬁts with her experience.Unfreedom. In other words. I gather that suffering is a mode of living one’s body that takes into account the ontic features that affect the body and what is created at the intersection of that body and its relationship to certain features in the world. truly exist within her culture. Butler claims that Foucault ‘‘fails to recognize the concrete relations of power that both construct and condemn Herculine’s sexuality’’ (gt. examines the study of the nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite Herculine. like Adorno. even if the event is painted as natural (for example. and often overly determined by. and the Culture Industry
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just the abstract body.

I want to avoid what Adorno warns against. injury. These contexts will illustrate how social stories of certain kinds of pain and disease are more prominent and meaningful than others. Suffering obviously entails pain as a feature of subjective experience.19 The following examples of suffering in context illustrate how gender and sexuality are suffered by most of us as a sort of low-grade fever. or disease and the social context that creates. or disease. then we are only talking about half of that dialectical relationship. meet such that the discourse constructs the sufferer in a particular way. I will show how this dialectic operates with two examples of suffering created and conditioned by social narratives about sexuality and gender. reducing the particular experiences of suffering to categories that are too theoretical and abstract to encompass them. movements to ﬁnd
. If we are talking about pain or discomfort as a subjectively posited reality. I am skeptical about the existence of pure pain. and gives meaning to that pain. a cultural ideology that shapes us in ways of which we are only dimly aware. More speciﬁc forms of suffering often take place against the backdrop of sexualized. and these contexts are underwriters of the cultural narratives that create the suffering. gendered. not just the simple presence of these. However. Next. These narratives construct the sufferer in certain speciﬁc and homogeneous ways that eradicate the particularity of individual experience. so I am not sure that this distinction is very clear-cut. conditions. but our fever can burn higher within certain social conditions that amplify that suffering. I want to discuss suffering within particular contexts in order to show how suffering comes from the social story or narrative about the pain.286
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event. racialized. With the presence of aids. we are talking about the social climate that allows the virus to spread in certain ways. we are not just talking about the virus that eventually causes pain and then death.
Suffering in Context
In this discussion of suffering. Therefore. in the form of discourse. Suffering is often where the body and the social-linguistic order. Suffering is a part of a dialectic between the individual’s experience of pain. and classed identities. but suffering is always situated and achieves meaning within a social context in which broader social and cultural forces are at work. injury.

He begins by commenting. Suffering. one that is infused with social mystiﬁcation and fear or with the heroic overcoming that such narratives often lapse into. Duttmann is expressing his desire to maintain the ambivalence that suf¨ ferers of aids experience and to not lapse into a typical aids narrative. poverty. the language used here always runs the risk of turning into jargon.Unfreedom. All the items in this list contribute to the social context of the suffering. but one that is experienced through the various changing social lenses with which we are all presented. He wants to present something that displays genuine resistance and opposition.’’ and such seemingly necessary existential dimensions. and drug use. words that also express fear of aids. having a ‘‘status. by their status. ‘‘An expression of afﬂiction and concern. or intend. how the social and political context fueled the suffering of particular individuals. immigrants. a jargon of authenticity or interiority.22 The social narratives that construct suffering often serve to reinforce ﬁxed notions of identity and difference. of not wanting to occupy oneself with aids. of not being at one with aids. distinguishing aids from a simply natural experience of a disease. but also that these dimensions cannot be thought of apart from the socially constructed story of aids. lack of governmental response. living with the virus in the presence of others to whom you will disclose your status or not. associated with sex. as indicated by the title.20 aids is not just a disease that is. anxiety about ‘‘dying before one’s time. fear. ﬂuid exchange. These simply existential features of death and being-toward-death take place within the social framework of aids as a shameful disease.’’21 Here. People with aids are simultaneously at odds with and at one with the virus. recognizing not only that aids entails guilt. Alexander Garcıa Duttmann ¨ views the virus from a particularized existential perspective. which in turn sets the conditions for the subjective experience of one’s own death. In fact. and the Culture Industry
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a cure. Randy Shilts shows us in his early history of the aids virus. choose.’’ and so on. but also recognizes the unique ambivalence that this virus inspires. they are determined in part. They serve to dichotomize and
. In his work At Odds with aids (Uneins mit ´ aids): Thinking and Talking About a Virus. But who will be surprised to read a book about aids that begins with these words? Words of resistance. a fear heightened by aids. but not wholly. Reagan’s not being able to say the word. gay men. Duttmann recognizes aids as a ¨ metaphor for the fear that we experience in relation to such social realities when we recognize that we are connected in ways that we do not want. fear of catching the virus. And the Band Played On.

’’ that having a breast and being
. As John Nguyet Erni suggests.23 Here she serves us ‘‘with a reminder that science has been a travel discourse. or class lines (such as the growing cases of infection among white middle-class heterosexual teenagers)?’’25 The answer to this question is that we may not make sense of the blurring of the lines between the afﬂicted and the healthy. intimately implicated in the other great colonizing and liberatory readings and writings so basic to modern constitutions and dissolutions of marked bodies of race. This dichotomy of pure and impure serves as an ideology that deﬁes the social realities of real practices. and the complicated and fragile identity positions that each body occupies. ‘‘There is a reason. sex. war. and class. As Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her personal breast cancer narrative. in part because these differences defy our presumptions about who suffers and who does not. This has particularly affected the narratives about aids and heterosexual women. gender. since the ideology of how such women have sex makes them appear to be at low risk. This blinds us to the fact that aids as virus crosses over from the impure/suffering to the pure/nonsuffering in ways that social narratives discourage us from thinking out. when real practices may not warrant this judgment. breast cancer for women serves as a metaphor for not only for what cancer signiﬁes generally. Similarly. why cancer is our metaphor for so many runaway social processes.288
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separate those who suffer from those who do not.’’24 These social narratives. ‘‘[H]ow do we make sense of the discouraging news about the ‘new’ infection in populations not easily identiﬁed along taken-for-granted sexual. Only if such groups remain distinct does the metaphor have the power to explain the world and sustain current ideology. like corruption and ‘moral decay’: we are no less out of control of ourselves. Social narratives about aids both lump those with aids into one tainted category while simultaneously acknowledging their difference from those not infected.’’26 However. and difference. not just the sensational and hyperbolic ones but the scientiﬁc and educational ones as well. she also notes that she gets the message from the anxiety surrounding her initial diagnosis that ‘‘femininity is death. construct the suffering person as a suffering person in a particular way. but insist on such isolated cases being statistical outliers who are somehow culpable for their own fate. but also for the condition of being a woman speciﬁcally. it occurs to me. racial. Donna Haraway acknowledges the power of scientiﬁc immune system discourse as a metaphor for contestation. aids narratives do not dwell effectively with the changing nature of the virus and the identities of those who become hiv positive.

because she previously thought that sex
. but also changes her relationship to men. . and the presence of infantilizing. and so forth—serve as amulets and talismans. such as being gay or being a woman.Unfreedom.28 In the face of this overwhelming narrative. justiﬁed. neither seems to be able to overcome the unsexy mark of mortality that Rennie’s body now bears. This is the culture that creates her suffering. transcendent. In the case of suffering a disease. paints a picture of it in advance. comforting the sufferer and providing visible evidence of faith. and cultural story of her own breast cancer is ‘‘pretty well mapped out in advance. there is Jake. a character who experiences suffering on several different levels throughout the course of the text. symbols of faith. we meet Rennie. covering over suffering with that ‘‘trustful reliance’’ that this suffering is reasonable. the narrative of positive thinking. in addition. not only can a particular situation serve as a metaphor for a powerless subject position. We see her experiencing the suffering involved in her breast cancer in such a way that it not only forces her to face her own mortality as one might expect. The products—teddy bear. The jargon of breast cancer functions as does Adorno’s jargon of authenticity. and displays of sisterhood deny the sentiment that this disease and its attendant suffering are not acceptable and that the social and environmental conditions that create the disease should be addressed.27 From her personal story and reaction to having the disease. In particular. . it does not speak to her experience. a picture that she rebels against because. she insists. Suffering. She ﬁnds that the scientiﬁc. pink-ribboned products in the corporate-funded breast cancer marketplace. she ﬁnds that she can barely carve out a space for her own unique experience of the disease. . the ignorance of the environmental factors that are likely causes of the disease. and the Culture Industry
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a woman have already implicated her in her own mortality. What has grown up around breast cancer in just the last ﬁfteen years more nearly resembles a cult. with whom she lived and with whom she has recently broken up as a result of the trauma of her breast cancer treatment. Initially we learn that Rennie is being treated for breast cancer and has recently undergone a mastectomy. disease can lead to a greater appreciation for the suffering caused by the subject position independent of that disease. social. This surprises Rennie. pink ribbon brooches.’’29 But these comforts.’’ such that she has limited control over her treatment or her emotional response. In Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm. Although Rennie and Jake seem to try to stay together and remain interested in sex with each other. Ehrenreich rightly points to the culture of breast cancer. ‘‘ ‘Culture’ is too weak a word to describe all this.

suffering. through her more dramatic and immediate experience of suffering. that her gender makes her especially vulnerable and that aspects of her relationships with men that she did not used to ﬁnd frightening actually were low-grade versions of the explicit modes of suffering that she is observing and on the verge of experiencing now. at parties. it wasn’t crucial. . until a new experience of suffering causes her to reﬂect on her situation as a woman in a ‘‘real’’ situation of subjugation. if she really was a beautiful stranger or a slave girl or whatever it was that he wanted her to pretend. he liked to hold her so that she couldn’t move. like gossip. even as she periodically recounts his dominance over her and her loss of self in the relationship. once he put his arm across her throat and she really did stop breathing.’’31 Or so she thinks. which she experiences during the time she spends in prison after a revolutionary uprising on the island of Ste. but play that mimicked her lack of agency within the relationship. Now. Admit it. This experience helps Rennie make the connection between all the levels of suffering that she experiences within the context of her being a woman. he liked thinking of sex as something he could win at. He liked that. Later in the novel she casually relays to us in a reminiscence that ‘‘Jake liked to pin her hands down.’’30 She normalizes her relationship with Jake early in the novel. Rennie comes to change her position on what counts as suffering and what its source is. a pleasant form of communication. He would never do it if it was real. Jake used to like to ask her to look and dress in certain sexy ways. Rennie thinks that their throats will be cut. The adventure takes place under the auspices of her writing a travel piece. It was a game. Sometimes he really hurt her. So she didn’t have to be afraid of him. ‘‘She used to think that sex wasn’t an issue. To avoid further treatment and other complications back home. For example. Agathe. However. Danger turns you on. she witnesses prisoners getting their hair cut via bayonet blade in the courtyard. Rennie had always taken this as a no-risk form of play. People commented on it. he said. . and meaning of her disease ﬁlls her consciousness until she ﬁnds herself no longer able to function in her capacity as a freelance writer. . through the prison bars. we ﬁnd that through a heightened experience of her own and other people’s suffering. they both knew that. as if they were admiring a newly renovated house. People who got too into sex ´ were a little outre. Rennie embarks on an adventure. better than jogging. But they
. Thinking about the pain. A good relationship: that’s what she and Jake were supposed to have. At ﬁrst. What mattered was the relationship. She realizes.290
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with men was uncomplicated. it was a pleasant form of exercise.

This example illuminates Adorno’s deﬁnition of suffering. it’s rational. high-pitched suffering of disease. such as gender. The justiﬁcation for this deﬁnition lies in experience. it is hard to distinguish the real from the ideal in his use of terms (of course. Suffering is not natural and is not a permanent feature of the human condition. is senseless. she had to witness the suffering of others. and speciﬁcally the suffering of women. and by the culture industry. Just as individuals suffer from diseases partially within human control. I will explain how this lower grade of suffering occurs within the context of the culture industry and the promise of art to create ways of being that exceed such categories.
Suffering Gender in the Culture Industry
Often when reading Adorno. not ﬁxed or natural conditions. this is a problem of translation as
. Rennie concludes that ‘‘[s]he’s afraid of men and it’s simple. she’s afraid of men because they are frightening.’’34 However. Rennie reﬂects on how suffering is relative to her situation. Even in moments when individuals are not actively experiencing the intense. and the Culture Industry
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are just being forced to submit to prison policy. so do whole classes of individuals suffer as a result of socially generated identity categories and the way in which they are rigidly constituted as a result.Unfreedom. political upheavals. not a subjective. there is a lower grade of suffering that comes from being overly determined by identity categories. fear. The pervasiveness and seeming naturalness of the social-political landscape comes from socially generated. and the like. From this experience. In the following section. I want to extend this deﬁnition of suffering to address the seemingly permanent features of this social-political landscape that causes human beings en masse to suffer in varying degrees.’’33 Ultimately. which changed as she traveled. Rennie’s whiteness and nationality as a Canadian save her from the worst possibilities of her imprisonment. Rather suffering from the standpoint of the particular which endures it. by social conditions. but a dialectical one. but is primarily caused by social and political events and conditions. As Cornell writes.32 From her intensiﬁed experience of suffering. ‘‘Suffering is not merely recognized by Adorno as historical or natural necessity. In order to realize that her relationship to these others was as a privileged Westerner. or imprisonment. But she also experienced her gender as a liability and a heightened source of suffering when chaos erupted. Suffering.

Marx and Nietzsche. Adorno expresses what culture ought to be and how it ought to function in different ways in different texts.292
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well). ‘‘Imagination is replaced by a mechanically relentless control mechanism which determines whether the latest imago
. In each case he holds out some hope for culture to serve human freedom.’’ Adorno shows how the culture industry serves as a ﬁlter or matrix through which we perceive reality and points out that this schema functions like a Kantian schema. there is no culture at all properly speaking. There are the artifacts that other people call art (kitsch) and there is autonomous art. Why is Adorno so skeptical about the power of culture? Because culture as it ought to operate is being consistently and increasingly co-opted by the culture industry.’’ he asserts this deﬁnition. And then. he contrasts culture with exchange. He writes.’’35 Here culture is the refusal to accept the world of exchange that reduces the value of objects and subjects to their use values. as long as there is no cultural force that genuinely and fully contests the world of exchange. there is the culture industry and there is ‘‘real’’ culture. Adorno’s deﬁnition of culture in Mimima Moralia is not equated with ideology or lies. as it is for his two main inﬂuences. The culture industry effectively eradicates freedom by preﬁguring certain kinds of choices and in that sense limits the reality that we can receive. There is pop music and music that challenges the status quo. However. Instead. In his essay ‘‘The Schema of the Culture Industry. delimiting what is possible for our experience and imagination. in this essay Adorno continues to decry the ability of culture to stand up in the face of a powerful and totalizing status quo. even despite his most depressing critiques of the all-encompassing effects of the culture industry. Adorno consistently discusses the limitations on the imagination that the culture industry imposes. and how our capacity for thought is reduced to repackaged images and words. or the marketplace as Adorno sometimes calls it. Even more broadly in his essay ‘‘Culture and Administration. However.’’36 This deﬁnition seems motivated by a hope that culture will always be there as a safeguard against injustices (particularly institutional ones) or at least to bear witness to the suffering caused by them. then it is true that that such refusal is illusory as long as the existent exists. ‘‘Culture—as that which goes beyond the system of selfpreservation of the species—involves an irrevocably critical impulse towards the status quo and all institutions thereof. and culture whatever refuses to accept the domination of that world. Throughout his various works. ‘‘If material reality is called the world of exchange value.

either ﬁt with that brute reality or else they are considered to be false. from the perspective of culture industry. This is what Judith Butler is talking about when she discusses the copy for which there is no original. what we end up with is nothing but reiﬁcation of the status quo recreated as an exact copy.Unfreedom. such as they exist in the ﬁeld. too. Ideas. and cultural critique.’’37 If that reality is primarily a culturally constructed reality.38 If there ever was an original. insofar as it never corresponds to reality. ideally we are looking to their conceptual content. actually a technique for the distribution of a real object’’ (‘‘Schema. We need art and myth to counter the empirical
. These myths can be instructive. it is really for political reasons that Adorno consistently tackles problems in aesthetics. Adorno’s critique shows us how difﬁcult it is to even posit the myth of autonomous art or autonomous styles of gender. The world becomes an inert ﬁeld of objects to be taken as brute and natural facts. and ideas.’’ 64). not their status as object.’’ But the idea that what is ‘‘realistic’’ is socially conditioned drops out of what is considered reality. At best we can create myths about what that original might be (like Aristophanes’ myth in The Symposium). but they are reconstructions of something imaginary. accurate and reliable reﬂection of the relevant item of reality. Suffering. taking a longer historical view. from which these cheap copies are supposed to come. so our capacity for critique is diminished. if we are allowed to think them. is a barometer for our diminished status as political beings. the original simply becomes a myth and then disappears forever. the alleged original. However. are likewise treated as though they were objects. In ‘‘Schema. Within the schema of the culture industry. This is how Adorno links the capacity for our reception of art with our capacity for critique. though this critique could be extended to how we perceive any object or idea. Our inability to grapple with the truth content of art. social. but is produced and treated by us as consumer products. and the Culture Industry
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to be distributed really represents an exact. When we receive works of art. In his analysis. as Adorno and Butler would claim. ‘‘[t]he work of art becomes its own material and forms the technique of reproduction and presentation. This forecloses the possibility of imagination. which is a necessary component of political. and we become unable to even process anything that is not ‘‘realistic. it has disappeared from view such that we cannot even reconstruct it. Adorno is talking about how ideas and works of art in recent history are being degraded by new junk that is being sold to us as the equivalent to high art.’’ Adorno uses art as an example of how we ‘‘receive’’ reality.

40 ‘‘Certainly every ﬁnished work of art is already predetermined in some way. Reality in this case becomes completely unproblematic. Butler writes that the situation of gender is socially constructed in a certain way. Mass culture on the other hand simply identiﬁes with the curse of predetermination and joyfully fulﬁlls it’’ (‘‘Schema. devoid as a site of critique. ‘‘They [ideals] are accepted as an ahistorical given along with others and the honour which they owe to their opposition to life becomes a means of vindicating them as legitimate and successful elements of real life’’ (‘‘Schema.’’ 72). In expressing the way
. such that they can scarcely be enacted or thought. Of course. not taken seriously and under threat of annihilation. As Adorno would phrase it. like a meaningless cultural product. reiﬁed in new ways by the culture industry. there is no reason not to think of one’s own gender as natural and inert. it is there.’ ’’39 This is the story of gender according to Judith Butler. ‘‘Subjected to gender. but art strives to overcome its own oppressive weight as an artefact through the force of its own construction. but in a sense is not real. the matrix of gender relations is prior to the emergence of the ‘human. In other words. treated objectively. . gender functions as an ideal that gets its worth from being continually instantiated into and onto objects.’’ 65). Ideally. but there like a Halloween costume.294
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reality that we face. they do not point to the world that is not yet. but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves . ideals in this sense are ideological. not the choice of a free subject who is already there. Is gender such a schema that forecloses imaginative possibilities? The presence of gendered persons. as a condition for the possibility. the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering. they become cemented as these ahistorical and natural givens. assuming that you did make a free choice. But ideals in the culture industry are not imaginative ideas to be aspired to. but subjectivated by gender. . identities also strive to overcome their inertia and weight. The alternative is to adopt the culturally designated correct identity as your own. Since the choice is preconscious and historically imbedded. we would rather take such ideals as givens than be bothered with interrogating them. nor are they socially generated in the form of a common vision.’’ 65). and it seems to serve as a schema. The potential for a critical standpoint continues to erode. otherwise the ‘‘is’’ becomes the ‘‘ought’’ (‘‘Schema. Any gendered style that does not ﬁt with a preestablished reality not only is not accepted. forecloses the possibilities of other types of objects and ideas. As such ideals become reiﬁed over and over again in the same way.

‘‘It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces. Suffering.Unfreedom. ‘‘Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature. if we are fortunate we treat ourselves as objects that do not experience suffering but observe the suffering of others as part of a natural process that somehow we have been saved from.’’ 63). inevitable.’’41 Granted. All are culturally posited and reiﬁed as universal. or as brought on by those who just do not have the savvy to play by the sex/gender rules. and the Culture Industry
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in which cultural categories become naturalized. contrived. when as Adorno and Butler would argue. as an aberrant problem that occurs only to the unfortunate upon whom nature does not smile favorably. This is how gendered systems and other oppressive systems that cause suffering maintain their
. an odd quote. that the origins of the natural can be traced to cultural roots. we may observe others’ suffering as a result of their gender or sexuality. is merely the scar of social mutilation. and natural events. not genuine. These social and cultural sources of allegedly natural categories ﬁt both gender and other forms of suffering. Through the lens of the culture industry. If the psychoanalytical theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration. but I think that Adorno is recognizing that what is true for other cultural categories is also true for gender. In a passage in which Adorno is talking about the pseudoforms of happiness sold to us by psychoanalysis conjoined with the marketplace of junky pleasures. ‘‘The viewer [of a cultural product] is supposed to be as incapable of looking suffering in the eye as he is of exercising thought’’ (‘‘Schema. The woman who feels herself a wound when she bleeds knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a ﬂower because that suits her husband. But the positing of these categories/events as natural allows us to receive them passively instead of actively engaging in critique or in constructing ourselves as distinct from this cultural ideology. Similarly.’’ 69). Adorno himself addresses gender. they are not. their neurosis gives them an inkling of truth. if we are traditionally gendered and heterosexual. he writes. In both cases an appeal to naturalness or a deviation from it is used to cover over our collective responsibility for the suffering of others and a lack of recognition of the ways in which we all suffer from prepackaged acculturation. and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain’’ (‘‘Schema.

2. Theodor W. ‘‘Culture and Administration. My theoretical response to suffering gender would be something like Adorno’s immanent critique of culture combined with Butler’s notion of nonﬁxed performative identity—though both these strategies are not pure and each is unsure of what is possible within different conﬁgurations of power that create and situate us and that we cannot escape. A position like this would both complicate the sort of the stance we take toward culture. 1991). J. trans. 1993). whether the culture industry or a heterosexual matrix. Now. Adorno. If the chain of events that led to the suffering were exposed. Butler is hopeful that new identities can emerge as a result of and despite the heterosexual matrix. 4. Adorno (Cambridge. introduction to Theodor W. they are potentially cofounding. Bernstein (New York: Routledge. trans. I conclude with a note on what disruption. might look like. and ourselves. Bernstein (New York: Routledge. Jay emphasizes Adorno’s fear that ideology will be so totalizing as to annihilate ideology itself. as a feminist ethics. too. 4. 1991). it could very well lead us to enact a plan to disrupt it. Mass. 5. M.: Harvard University Press. nature. Ideology requires an interplay between power relationships to take place and would not be possible if one totalizing power emerged with no resistance.
. J. and therefore the capacity for life will be. Although the relationship between freedom. ‘‘This transparency [of modern society] is itself masked by cultural practices that are unmediated reproductions of the status quo. 113.’’ in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. and imagination are dead. practices which lack the necessary tension between justiﬁcation and reality for immanent critique’’ (177). 3. Adorno’s and Butler’s projects expose ways in which an autonomous and aesthetic way of being and becoming is increasingly impossible in modern society. See Martin Jay. Bernstein. This chapter is a continuation of my work in Adorno’s reading of Kant and an outgrowth of my concern with an appropriate philosophical response to suffering. J. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Jay writes. trans. The Dialectic of Enlightenment.’’ International Studies in Philosophy 29 (Winter 1997). I have argued in another work that Adorno’s view of suffering that appears in Negative Dialectics has signiﬁcance for a postmodern ethics in my article ‘‘Philosophers and the Holocaust: Mediating Public Disputes. and life is complicated. art. How can we ourselves enact something approximating freedom when ideology is foreclosing the possibility of existence itself? Adorno is worried that we will eventually operate in a world where art.
Notes
1. M. 1984). 131. I am curious what Adorno has to offer to a feminist ethics that can address suffering as well. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. M. So. John Cumming (New York: Continuum. creativity. Adorno. Adorno.296
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existence.

Adorno. Adorno advocated philosophical self-reﬂection.’’ in Feminism as Critique. 1999. ed. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge. Aesthetic Theory. B. Nussbaum. 12. February. see Carrie L. Lenhardt (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hull also claims that Butler wants language to be able to correspond to reality. 1990). Theodor Adorno. 128. 1984). The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge. The Jargon of Authenticity. 27. Adorno is interested in how ideas and defenses of them can be a necessary part of immanent critique. See Deborah Cook. 145. 18. 10. Wurzer. he did not necessarily favor the particular over the concept. Unbearable Weight: Feminism. ‘‘Kantian Snapshot of Adorno: Modernity Standing Still.: Rowman and Littleﬁeld. ed. Since they are universals. hereafter abbreviated as gt. The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. Theodor W. Also. and one that the idealists leave out.Unfreedom. For an interesting and deliberate misreading of Adorno’s view of the subject from a postmodern perspective. 1994). which Bernstein criticizes as Freudian in this case. M. but favored a balance between the two and a modest positing of the concept. 9. Although Adorno consistently attacked identity thinking as an expression of idealism or of positivism. and a virtually totalizing one at that. Aspects of Sociology. E. Adorno on Mass Culture (Lanham. See Martha C. E. 289–94. trans. hereafter abbreviated as nd. 1974). 1997). Theodor W.’’ in The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern. Jephcott (New York: Verso. Bernstein claims that Adorno’s treatment of freedom in Negative Dialectics gives us a strange form of metacritique as immanent critique. Although Hull partially falls into the mistake of reading Butler as a radical constructionist. Suffering. 202. ‘‘Variations on Sex and Gender. According
. Adorno. Hull. For another example of what I consider to be a misreading of Butler that compares her work to that of Adorno. 22. 1987). ‘‘The Need in Thinking: Materiality in Theodor W. 1996).’’ Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997): 22–35. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Any assertion of concepts should tacitly acknowledge this gap or excess entailed in using concepts. ‘‘The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler. Adorno. ‘‘Despite the inadequacy of philosophical concepts. ed. 1992).’’ New Republic. trans. 2001). Bernstein. What is missing from her analysis is how gender functions as an ideology. Cited in Jay. For a critique of Adorno’s use of psychoanalysis. F. such as their critiques of idealism. 24. even ‘‘other’’ realities. and the Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Judith Butler. or even as a historical genealogy. 264. Adorno would argue that Butler succumbs to identity thinking by subsuming the autonomy of the object into the subject by way of discourse. N. 14. Negative Dialectics. concepts say both more and less than the particulars they subsume’’ (80). 1993). 1972). trans. trans. 135–53. Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from a Damaged Life. C. the body behind the will. whatever bodies are in any natural or raw form. 13. 1973). 8. and the Culture Industry
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6. freedom for Adorno is always conditioned by natural history. Drucilla Cornell. Max Pensky (Albany: State University of New York Press. 11. Ashton (New York: Continuum. 37–45. she still acknowledges that Butler maintains that language and materiality are distinct even though they cannot be thought apart from each other (26). Theodor Adorno. Western Culture. 15. trans. 7. 74. we cannot perceive them because they are preﬁgured for us in a discourse that makes them intelligible to us only as sexed and gendered. Md. see J. 17. and Susan Bordo. see Wilhelm S. John Viertel (London: Heinemann. If this is the case. Adorno continually ﬁlls in the material underpinning of any theory freedom. Judith Butler. Hull argues that though there are many substantial similarities between the positions of Adorno and Butler. The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 117. Adorno and Judith Butler. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman. 27. 250–62. or reﬂection on the nature of thought itself. and that this shows her sympathy with Hegelianism (27). 16.

32. suffering itself is socially conditioned and does not happen to just a body. 1991). People. Alexander Garcia Duttmann. 36.’’ 38. and the subject are all in ﬂux. Adorno. I acknowledge that there is a problem with the notion of a standpoint when we say that suffering. Bodies That Matter. Butler is acknowledging the operation of materiality. Ehrenreich. 4–6). yet we may one day know that reality’’ (27). Theodor W. Bernstein. ‘‘Dialectics cannot be a ‘standpoint’ (nd.’’ 116. ‘‘Culture and Administration. Martin’s. M. 111–19. 26. Margaret Atwood. 33. ‘‘Welcome to Cancerland. Ehrenreich. 93. Bodily Harm. J. Nancy L. See Judith Butler.’’ in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Barbara Ehrenreich.’’ 44. but a woman’s body. Adorno. Hull uses Adorno’s acknowledgment of suffering as evidence that the material body has some ontological priority. 300–315. and the aids Epidemic (New York: St. a Jewish body. Haraway. At Odds with aids: Thinking and Talking About a Virus. I acknowledge that these contexts cannot be genuinely understood apart from each other. Atwood. With Butler. Hull ignores Butler’s shared goal with Adorno that what we need to do is to create new realities that are not there yet.’’ in Simians. 64. and how gender speciﬁcally functions as a Kantian schema. M.’’ 43. The Philosophy of the Limit. ‘‘Welcome to Cancerland.’’ in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. 28. Atwood. ‘‘Butler has basically asserted that there is no distinct reality outside of discursive. Minima Moralia.’’ 50. 203–30. ed. 31. and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge. But. an a priori method or an independent project of reason. Atwood. ‘‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination. Last. Ehrenreich. Adorno. a terrorist’s body. ‘‘The Schema of Mass Culture. Bodily Harm (New York: Anchor Books/ Doubleday. 19. 28. 20. 30. 197. 3–4. At Odds with aids. 22. which Butler does not deny. 1981). 27. 26.’’ Harper’s Magazine. See Donna J. Adorno. ways of thinking and of creating the material world. 1987). hereafter cited as ‘‘Schema. Randy Shilts. 25.’’ J. 37. 39. 24. Bodily Harm. Bodily Harm. 278–80. 40. 35. 1997). 1996). 44. ´ ¨ 21. John Nguyet Erni. ‘‘Welcome to Cancerland. ‘‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse. 1991). 230. 1993). social practice. Haraway. 44. ‘‘Welcome to Cancerland: A Mammogram Leads to a Cult of Pink Kitsch.298
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to Hull. for were it so it would be in contradiction with the claimed dependence of concept on object. Cyborgs. 279. Duttmann. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge. ‘‘Ambiguous Elements: Rethinking the Gender/Sexuality Matrix in an Epidemic. is always already socially conditioned in several ways. if my argument in this chapter works. ¨ 23. Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press. Roth and Katie Hogan (New York: Routledge. 7. The material body. social forces. ed.’’ 221. And the Band Played On: Politics. this position leads Butler into a key contradiction. However. Cornell. trans.’’ in Gendered Epidemic: Representations of Women in the Age of aids. new possibilities. 29. In this sense. ‘‘Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies. 1998). and so on. By a critical
. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge. 1–2. November 2001. Bernstein (New York: Routledge. 34. but simultaneously hoping that that schema does not wholly determine our capacity for sight or insight. Butler. while ignoring that possibility that gender itself could constitute a kind of suffering. trans. Judith Butler.

. though still operates within it in order to happen at all. 95. This critical standpoint would be a precondition of immanent critique. I simply mean a changeable and ﬂuid stance that ﬁnds some distance from proscribed cultural narratives to some extent. Minima Moralia. Adorno. Suffering.Unfreedom. since immanent critique requires some distance from ideology. and the Culture Industry
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standpoint. 41.

.

Theodor Adorno criticizes the way in which the mainstream aesthetic norms that characterize Western culture pass themselves off as universally appealing. On the contrary. undomesticated quality of modernist art precisely because it contravenes the predominant sensibility. relaxing. Indeed. privileged by its disconnection from the social sphere. or an antidote to life’s troubles. he extols the jarring. for Adorno all art must make social engagement
. It utterly rejects the traditional assumption that art resides in an apolitical sanctuary. Eager to dismantle the complacency of bourgeois society. modernist art’s frequently abrasive impact challenges the premise that art should be pleasing.14
Unmarked and Unrehearsed
Theodor Adorno and the Performance Art of Cindy Sherman
Mary Caputi
In his defense of modernist art.

This explains his famous statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz is ‘‘barbaric. progressive edge? Here. Sherman’s subtle. rather than explode. and divert. its contrapuntal qualities themselves become mainstream and thus lose their maverick. By extension. and can no longer claim autonomy from the society it critiques? What happens when. she offers hope by illustrating how those unmarked. by placing his aesthetic theory alongside the early feminist performance art of Cindy Sherman. for shock challenges the ‘‘feeble-mindedness [that] has by now established itself as common sense. the aesthetic realm’s domestication spells cultural death as the venues for political opposition are denied expression. unrehearsed dimensions
. offers an alternative to modernist art’s untenable position. which foregrounds the undomesticated qualities of convention itself. for art is an inquiry into political life. I would like to argue that Sherman’s performance art.’’ if by poetry we understand a delicately crafted verse meant to delight. while Adorno claims that the avant-garde must always atone for its guilty measure of inevitable cultural appropriation. Modernist art’s ability to disrupt our ingrained assumptions and unsettle our complacency disallows its claiming apolitical intentions. the ‘‘common sense’’ of gendered meanings by highlighting those meanings’ unstable foundations and by demonstrating how the appearance of gender’s domestication is itself merely facade. In sum. as inevitably it will. She seeks to implode. appease. Adorno feels. Sherman’s work provides a critique of gender unhampered by such feelings of guilt. This is because her art critiques bourgeois categories from within their own lexicon and offers a feminist reading of gender that unveils the profound instabilities that inhere in the mainstream itself. Thanks to the subtlety of her early work. deliberately understated disruption of the status quo offers a way out of modernism’s ingrained conundrum.’’ and thus keeps alive the critical faculty that. for it freshens our responses only so long as it maintains autonomy from culture’s more hegemonic forces.302
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its primary task.1 Art’s ability to challenge the damage wrought by common sense thus clearly relies upon ` its retaining an undomesticated stance vis-a-vis the mainstream. popularized and familiar. for its oppositional status safeguards it from collaboration in what is ‘‘barbaric.’’ Its power to shock is in fact a venue for healing change. of which Adorno was surely aware. has otherwise been appropriated by bourgeois charm. Hence. I would like to examine this problem. But what happens when even the avant-garde bears traces of appropriation.

twelve-tone composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg can be understood in terms of these composers’ ability to contravene our commonsense notions about what makes music theoretically engaging or aesthetically beautiful. anesthetizing practices of the culture industry. Adorno’s high praise for atonal. There can be nothing soothing or serene in its delivery lest its powers be appropriated to anesthetize rather than to subvert. Ask a musician if the music is a pleasure. ‘‘In an age of repressive collectivism. the power of resistance to compact majorities resides in the lonely. If the grating dissonance of atonal music can liberate us from the grip of bourgeois assumptions through its own painful irresolution. a cultural icon. Adorno argues. This power of resistance has become the sine qua non of art. exposed producer of art. thereby refusing to participate in the standardized. the reply is likely to be—as in the American joke of the grimacing cellist under Toscanini—‘I just hate music. without it. he notes that ‘‘modern works shoot toward the viewer as on occasion a locomotive does in a ﬁlm. Because tonal resolution always spells surrender. Such validation demands that the artist remain ‘‘lonely’’ as he or she doggedly resists absorption into the hegemonic mainstream.
Adorno and the Artwork’s Atonement
In order to function as a repository for new cultural values. Hence in Aesthetic Theory. transformative purpose. It must thwart the standard ideas about the aesthetic realm’s purpose and through its jarring impact awaken its audience’s dormant social conscience. music must intentionally avoid the dominant aesthetic norm in order to serve its healing.’ ’’2 Indeed. displaying an unmistakable resistance to the status quo.’’3 Only if art succeeds at disruption can it escape from the subject’s immediate cognitive grasp. There must be a concerted effort on behalf of the artist to avoid becoming a celebrity. art would be socially untrue. By challenging our
. then its social function is validated.’’ The cost is too great and the slippage too automatic when dissonance becomes widely appealing. Adorno argues. modernist art must be disquieting.Unmarked and Unrehearsed
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of gender’s conventions can in fact expose the deep anxieties that produced them. and art’s truth morphs damningly into yet another form of social control. or a folk hero lest his or her art lose its social ‘‘truth.

despite appearances. striving to unsettle the docile society at large as it surprises and disturbs the audience in front of it. ‘‘[S]omeone sitting in a cafe who is suddenly struck by the music and listens intensely may feel odd to himself and seem foolish to others. Consequently. Such music is a ‘‘force ﬁeld’’ capable of summing up the surrounding culture’s irrationality while simultaneously opposing it. we can similarly dream of a different social and political order unencumbered by capitalism’s irrationality. art produces the insight that the reigning cultural paradigm. by thwarting the senses and unsettling our cognitive complacency. but also disrupts an unwitting. it can affect human consciousness in ways that encourage critical thinking and restore the transformative potential of the imagination. ‘‘The artwork is both the result of the process and the process itself at a standstill. The intellectual distance and ironic edge that it allows can function as catalysts for profound internal change even when hegemonic forces appear so deeply ingrained. modernist art retains some promise of a different society. as a twentieth-century German Jew. signaling a ray of hope. then. While art cannot offer a clear political agenda that will bring about social change. For instance. Indeed. In this antagonism the fundamental relation of art and society appears. The ability to confront and destabilize hegemonic forces allows the artwork to function metonymically. there must always be something unrecognized in its expression.’’5
. and thus exert the hopeful. revolutionary impact now missing from more conventional political practices. was only too familiar. brutalities with which Adorno.’’4 Importantly.304
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cognitive assumptions. a chink in the armor of despair even amidst its own jarring disturbance. by bringing the social order to a standstill and revealing its contradictions. the disquieting impact of atonal music not only confronts an audience expecting to be soothed and appeased. and their impact so thoroughly ´ unrivaled. unrecognized cultural acquiescence which Adorno deems sorely in need of change. For if we can imagine a new form of cultural engagement. truly progressive art can force a radical reconsideration of social norms. something unexpected and unclear about its performance that stretches the limits of our complacent imaginations and unsettles our intellectual categories. Modernist art both exposes a society’s irrationality and embodies it as it purposefully runs counter to the audience’s collective expectations. Adorno argues. We can imagine a world unpracticed in the brutalities of the Western tradition. is eminently malleable.

Its contrapuntal impact notwithstanding. reafﬁrms given social relations. that bourgeois culture is not synonymous with common sense but in fact engenders an irrationality that simply goes unchallenged. Oppositional art can adumbrate political change by critiquing the culture of which it is nevertheless a by-product. it must retain some dialectical interrelation with its opposite. whose structure disallows the pleasing resolution of the seven-tone scale. the aesthetic function that Adorno extols insists on a painful dissonance so that the possibility of cultural healing might be kept alive within its own unlikely. Aware of this irony. Adorno concedes that even the jarring twelvetone music of Schoenberg. to some degree. and it is ‘‘culpable’’ in that it always. For even as such art highlights its autonomy from cultural forces. appears revolutionary only in the context of Brahms. it nevertheless displays the degree to which it remains enmeshed within the very system that it critiques. nor does it appease. Schoenberg. for true art is not ‘‘culinary’’ in purpose.Unmarked and Unrehearsed
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Indeed. such that per-
. The act of contesting social categories ﬁrst afﬁrms. Atonality necessarily takes tonality as its point of reference. then. For art can awaken the public to the fact that current social relations are not immutable. as some measure of cooperation in the status quo remains embedded in its expression. Beethoven. there is always a residual conservatism to even the most revolutionary art. Adorno’s enthusiasm for modernism’s disruptive. then. revolutionary dimension of art has nothing to do with the audience’s ‘‘appreciation’’ of it. as its dissonance is interpreted only in relation to the pleasing resolutions of tonal music. all art necessarily restates and reafﬁrms the very conﬁnes that are in question. Ironically. Rather. this ability to produce a signiﬁcant change in human consciousness constitutes the artwork’s political importance as it both brings together and radically opposes the existing social order. and Chopin. undisciplined expression. if unwittingly. Hence the autonomous. the far-reaching inﬂuence that such categories have had and upholds the success of the very ideology that is in question. He admits that aesthetic expression can only critique the existing social order from within that order’s own categories and that in order to be meaningful. Its ability to be autonomous thus remains blunted. conﬁrms the appeal of the musical tradition that it strives to subvert. progressive potential recognizes the limits of the autonomy of modern art and understands that its unassimilated voices always bear some relation to the status quo.

To posit atonal music as undomesticated.7 Thus implicated in the forces of control. contemporary art ‘‘never entirely divested itself of its authoritarian inheritance. .’’ since it remains implicated in the reigning paradigm whose conventions it despises. there can be no escape from the forces of production that give rise to revolutionary art’s expression. and materialism that were so abhorrent to Adorno during his lifetime were necessarily restated in the artwork’s efforts to discredit the same. forever refers back to the authoritarianism it so assiduously criticized.’’6 Ultimately.9 Modernist art thus retains a marked ambivalence. is to invoke the domesticated tradition that it necessarily addresses. it will always display what Linda Hutcheon terms ‘‘irony’s edge’’: the fact that irony always restates and thus reafﬁrms precisely what it is trying to subvert.’’ guilty of participating in that which it denounces. By deﬁnition. its unrebellious malice. ensuring that his experience of Nazi Germany would remain the framework within which he wrote. then. As an unwilling agent of conservatism. all modernist art ironically participates in ‘‘disaster. and its revolutionary potential can never claim complete autonomy from the powers that be. such intimacy. His famous work on the authoritarian personality. then. ‘‘At present. . but must atone for its sin. for instance. Hence the racism. Hutcheon warns. art works are socially culpable. and its commitment to truthfulness ensures that it can never hide its guilty internal conﬂict. ‘‘[A]s prisoner of its own form.’’ Adorno writes. ‘‘can always be seen as complicity. The hope that modernism holds out for changed social relations always remains tainted by a pessimistic undercurrent. beguiling double entendres hinder and diminish their oppositional status. . and the new society he envisaged could only bear traces of the Nazi regime from which he ﬂed. then. antiSemitism. all works of art including radical ones have a conservative tinge.’’8 Caught up in such a paradoxical web. for they help reinforce the existence of a separate domain of spirit and culture whose practical impotence and complicity with the principle of unmitigated disaster are painfully evident. just as to rebel against a musical tradition is to afﬁrm that tradition’s hegemony.’’10
. whose beguiled. Such is the paradox of progressive forces. art—like other forms of social criticism—remains ‘‘culpable.306
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forming Schoenberg’s music necessarily invokes the classical tradition he strives to oppose. The ambivalent nature of the avant-garde’s potential will always resides in the fact that it emanates directly from the cultural order that it critiques. Necessarily implicated within a conservative cultural network that alone generates its oppositional status.

they were. newspapers. and galleries. as even the most unsettling art-work remains implicated in the very culture that it disparages. the artwork’s degree of autonomous berth gives it room for creative repentance: ‘‘the worthy ones among them try to atone for their guilt. Thus. of striving to embrace and ﬁnd approval from precisely what he shunned.Unmarked and Unrehearsed
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Nevertheless. . Willem de Kooning. it can highlight the degree to which it remains unappropriated by the surrounding cultural forces. in order to challenge and undermine that same power. Lee Krasner. The ﬁlm’s director takes pains to dramatize Pollock’s self-hating struggle as Pollock alternately seeks out and rejects the company of these people. . to journals. the emphasis on material substance in modernist sculpture and architecture.’’ Yet this atonement is never absolute. To be sure. Pollock needed access to the corridors of power. and those committed to its development—Pollock. are all efforts to heighten art’s autonomy from bourgeois sensibilities. to atone. then Pollock was confronted with the troubling paradox of desiring what he opposed. And in many ways. artists such as Pollock needed the patronage and support of the art world’s luminaries in order to be counted within the very society they wished to critique. and thus unapologetically deﬁant of convention. Pollock’s love-hate relationship with these two persons is in many ways emblematic of how difﬁcult it is to declare oneself entirely free of the reigning cultural order. he has a brief romantic interlude with Guggenheim. By staying aloof. in its day abstract expressionism represented an innovative new genre. Yet.’’11 This atonement undoubtedly takes the form of its exaggerated abstraction and formalist retreat from conventional categories. it also dramatizes the artist’s conﬂicted relationships with two established pillars of the art world: art critic Clement Greenberg and wealthy patron Peggy Guggenheim. Jasper Johns. and hence meaningfully contrapuntal. They believed themselves to be an enclave unappropriated by the mainstream. the deliberate eschewal of everyday categories in abstract expressionist painting. Marc Rothko—saw themselves as working independently from the established system. and thereby allow ‘‘the worthy ones . Ed Harris’s ﬁlm Pollock (2000) dramatizes this conﬂict inherent in the avant-garde’s mission. Nevertheless. And if Greenberg and Guggenheim stood for the establishment. whose patronage surely helped advance his career. While the ﬁlm’s portrayal of Jackson Pollock’s career illustrates his unique methods of expression and daring creativity. in an act of deﬁance. Pollock
. Thus the atonality of twelve-tone music.

For if the voice of opposition can speak only from within the established parameters of power. This atonement keeps the project worthwhile: while the aesthetic avant-garde cannot offer a clear revolutionary agenda to a public ‘‘kneaded into shape by the culture industry. even as he admits the guilt of the art work’s conservatism.308
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also urinates into a ﬁreplace during an elegant party thrown by Guggenheim.12 The willingness to atone is thus the measure of artistic success. Adorno does not overstate the artwork’s social culpability and thus never gives up on the important if not unique revolutionary function that it serves.
Unrepentant: Cindy Sherman’s Staid Rebellion
The early work of feminist performance artist Cindy Sherman offers a different interpretation of revolutionary art’s role as double agent. Thus. rendering her and her well-heeled guests speechless. as the product of one concerned with the cultural meanings of gender.’’ it can provide the crucial insight of transformed perception that ultimately functions as a catalyst for social change. for modernism can rehabilitate its audience’s sensibilities only if it admits its own complicity in the forces of cultural conservatism. Adorno still concedes that art’s atonement redeems its progressive edge. As a repository for new cultural values. restating. working within the rank and ﬁle of a system that the artist simultaneously inhabits and critiques is far less problematic than for Adorno. Sherman’s work is unapologetic about its deliberate replaying. how much more necessary its expression of dissent. how much more clearly it expresses the need for subversion. Sherman’s photography and videotaped performances suggest that the atonement demanded by Adorno is unnecessary given that art’s entanglement in the powers that be is not an impediment. Still. If its atonement truly challenges the limits of the reigning cultural order. Indeed. even
. the aesthetic realm can never be read as merely complicitous in existing relations. the creative power of Sherman’s work allows it to operate from within well-rehearsed. Thus. then art can meaningfully function as a double agent. For her. Undisturbed and unapologetic about the artwork’s indeterminacies. If its opposition depends on its acquiescence. but the very venue for a meaningfully subversive assault. and reenacting of prevalent feminine archetypes to the point that her obvious cooperation in the system risks appearing as a simple endorsement.

unwillingly. Indeed. Such a changed consciousness ﬁrst of all demands that the body’s biological reality not be conﬂated with a naturalistic reading of gender. The deeper subject of Sherman’s feminist performance art is not the female body variously presented. For this reason. this does not diminish Sherman’s overall conﬁdence that her art will produce a changed social consciousness where the meaning of woman is concerned. precisely because their very abundance does not ensure. hair. since it is precisely such intimacy that allows the double agent to go to work. the wide-eyed ingenue primping for a ﬁrst date. Hence. it offers an effective mode of internal. immanent criticism that subverts as it mimes.Unmarked and Unrehearsed
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hackneyed cultural stereotypes without falling ‘‘prisoner of its own form. but thwarts.’’ Rather. since the more the body is performed. and makeup and captures herself on ﬁlm—the more ﬂuid and openended that category appears. her ease with stereotypes facilitates her critique of them and thus she need never repent. at remaking and re-creating herself. Their preponderance reveals instability. the sheer volume of Sherman’s videotaped performances and early photography reveals an ease with traditional feminine stereotypes. the downtrodden housewife overwhelmed with responsibilities. to confound and confuse the familiar conventions that she is at pains to represent. the brazen femme fatale lying across a sports car. that category’s certainties. then. Her work displays a conﬁdence that the intimacy described above need not be read as complicitous in what it critiques. to be discussed presently. to the status quo. On the contrary. Although her photography deliberately affects a certain unease. There is nothing guilty in her replaying of femininity’s most traditional guises. there is a conﬁdence in her ability to bring about a changed social consciousness without capitulating. as parodic ruse. Her art underscores the body’s unstable meanings and gender’s extreme tenuousness even as it replays society’s efforts to mark femininity as stable. The more Sherman is in control of her art and adept in the demands of performativity—the more she changes her clothes. She is so adept at changing modes. the less clear its meaning becomes. or that the outward physical markings of femaleness be read as coextensive
. but the instability of ‘‘woman’’ as a cultural category. an ease that is capable of making these stereotypes work against themselves. she dresses herself up to replay the familiar female archetypes: the glamorous actress in dark glasses. that she never falls prisoner of any form.

Deaggregating biology and gender brings into focus the weight of culture’s text. the discourse of gender is an assumed role. If skillfully read. even when it takes the form of the conventional and everyday. The term performance makes this analytic slippage particularly clear.’’13 Thus. a narrative. Indeed. just as the expressions of gender cannot prove the authenticity of gender. If gendered meanings adhere to an overarching. mutating marks are nothing more
. this means that their display is always open to interpretation. yet ultimately insecure cultural narrative. always ready to invalidate rather than to afﬁrm the pronouncements they make. Artists such as Sherman recognize that. ‘‘that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results. Thus.’’ On the contrary. dressed down—the resultant saturation works to critique not only the body. ‘‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender.’’ writes Judith Butler. that the reality of their biological immediacy need not obfuscate what is in fact the learned.310
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with a larger narrative about femininity’s ‘‘truth. highlighting how pervasively its inﬂuence shapes our desiring imaginations. the standard enactment of which can itself be the means of its own deconstruction. something that exists as the by-product of human agency and the ideological backdrop that informs that agency. while her work presents us time and again with a different rendition of the female form—glamorous. In the same manner. while gender’s narrative may be far-reaching and effective. but also gender (or the body as it participates in the construction of gender). Such an ingrained irony gives rise to the performativity upon which a feminist interpretation depends. dressed up. Sherman thus highlights the performative aspects of gender such that every claim to femininity’s ‘‘natural’’ meaning will be undermined. the lines he or she rehearses can be made to work against themselves and to invoke with a carefully regulated irony precisely the opposite of what they appear to convey. tired. acquired. performativity insists that bodies are read and not seen. culturally inscribed way in which we read them. In an effort to dramatize the weight of that ideology. put into question. its textual component always allows an interpretive space to challenge the manner in which it is received. What seemed simply biological now becomes a politicized text. for these restless. the narrative of gender is something humanly crafted. for it invokes the tremendous room for maneuver afforded an actor when interpreting a role. exposed as uncertain and provisional. neither can the outward ‘‘signs’’ of femininity verify its ontology.

It blurs the distinction. This admission of art’s inscription within the very culture that it seeks to critique of course parallels Adorno’s argument that the art both reconﬁrms and subverts bourgeois norms: art is implicated in the system that it contravenes.’’16 * * *
. but also its creator). between those roles that are traditionally assigned and thus highlights the anxieties of gender’s profound uncertainty. Yet for Sherman there is no need to atone for this implication. overtly stage their relationship to the viewer as corporeal. provocative or shy—that allows Sherman’s art to heal. . viewer and viewed (she is the subject of her art. thereby rendering suspect the cultural order that promotes them. . Jones afﬁrms that the collapsing and blurring of distinctions can rehabilitate female agency and thus serve feminist ends. By highlighting the interpretive angle open to all gendered meanings. reaching out even as it delivers an immanent criticism. To approach gender as one would a theatrical performance opens up interpretive vistas even as it unsettles the staid renditions of femininity and masculinity upon which we have long relied. intersubjective. this collapsing empowers women to assume the role of critic even as they promote and replay the many guises of their cultural inscription. As Amelia Jones explains in Body Art: Performing the Subject.’’15 Importantly. (because) it has the potential of overthrowing the paternal function.’’ a tendency to draw attention to the unsteady foundation upon which cultural meanings rest. disquieting beauty of Sherman’s early art rests on this fact as it dramatizes gender’s deeply held insecurities. The healing. theatrical dimension of meaning production. cultural critic and body-on-display (she is a performance artist going to work on herself). the difference between the signiﬁer and the signiﬁed itself . . for it is only in mimicking gendered stereotypes that she can reveal the anxieties of their unstable existence. there is ‘‘an anxious uncertainty put into play by the performative. in other words.14 This anxious uncertainty to which Jones alludes is surely played out in Sherman’s tendency to collapse the boundaries between self and other (Sherman is both the model and the artist). It is the disquiet—be it sinister or humorous. ‘‘[W]orks of art .Unmarked and Unrehearsed
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than performative utterances whose claims to truth can be deconstructed on their own grounds. invested. ‘‘Feminists have had much to gain from the narcissistic collapse of the boundaries between self and other. mutual. the distinctions between the public and the private. .

hesitant demeanor of so many of her subjects. her voyeurism is not meant to simply catch women unawares and thus reinscribe them within the purview of the male gaze. unaware that her image is being captured on ﬁlm. despite their reference to familiar settings and situations. The towel begins to unravel from around her body. as seen in the uneasy. this woman is not merely a body on display. then. apprehensive. The archetypes she works with constitute standard fare and often reproduce a seemingly hackneyed voyeurism in their perusal of women caught unawares. This is a photograph that has certainly caught her unawares. a prim woman appears to be visiting the downtown of a big city. a glamorous woman in a black dress looks ready for an evening out yet does not know that she is the subject of some voyeuristic fancy. a
. Instead. while the voyeuristic motif reconﬁrms traditional readings of gender. the image’s profound uncertainties and internal ruptures allow it to work against those readings. a young woman contemplates her image in the bathroom mirror. for instance. her creative approach to gender’s time-honored expressions is meant to register a profound uncertainty about the stereotypes being rehearsed. 2). These women either do not realize that they are being watched by the camera or are ill at ease with its intrusive gaze. and to allude to gender’s frailty. It is deliberate. but does not welcome the gaze that frames her face. 3). The viewer subsequently shares in this uncertainty. Subsequently. Thus. The nervous disruption that predominates here precludes its simply replaying the pleasures of looking. but that also registers her deep uncertainty about her own image. In Untitled Film Still 2. apprehensive. Her torso twists as if to imply a sudden gesture and a disruption in her train of thought. To be sure. She stands in an awkward position. Sherman’s purpose in replaying this motif extends beyond a mere desire to jump on the bandwagon and be voyeuristic herself. all of which jettisons the standard scopophilic pleasure of the pornographic setting. Sherman works from deep within traditional readings of gender to produce ﬁlm stills and photography intent on unsettling the stereotypes she so playfully reenacts. the woman wrapped in a towel appears worried. Thus in Untitled Film Still 2 (1977) (Fig. 1). that Sherman’s ﬁlm stills have anything but a reafﬁrming impact upon the viewer. And in 17 (1978) (Fig. for the looking that is foregrounded here is not entirely fun. Similarly in 14 (1978) (Fig. and surely constitutes a staple of pornography. While the pleasures of spying on women is a traditional motif in ﬁlm.312
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In her early work. uncertain of what she sees in the mirror. a towel wrapped around her. with an awkward expression on her face.

1977. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro
.
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Fig. 1 Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still Pictures Gallery.

Untitled Film Still Pictures Gallery. 2 Cindy Sherman. 1978.
14. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro
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Fig.

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Fig. Indeed. like her towel. 3 Cindy Sherman. easily comes undone in a gesture that reveals apprehension. There is an eerie quality resembling Hitchcock’s daring insight into everyday life’s uncanny side that draws us toward the unstable aspects of mainstream culture. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro
nude whose exposed ﬂesh reinscribes femininity within patriarchal parameters. along with the general awkwardness of the image. serving an equally rebellious purpose within the context of seemingly everyday scenes. In both instances. quizzical stance. works to unsettle the hackneyed gender scenario that it mimes. this bather is thus a double agent who both cooperates in and informs on the gendered meanings that envelop her by exposing that system’s tenuous hold. Untitled Film Still Pictures Gallery. curious. For that system. reminding us of the frailty and indeed potential collapse of those meanings that we construct for ourselves. the apprehension captured in this woman’s worried. Rather.
17. This same nervous apprehension predominates in stills 14 and 17. the women Sherman portrays are glamorously primed for
. 1978.

for the subject of this still is protected against the wind just as cultural categories presumably protect her from needing to reinvent or reinterpret herself. In Unmarked: the Politics of Performance. the rewriting of boundaries implies an instability echoed in the frightened anxiety we witness in her eyes. the women in both stills seem anything but complicitous in the events taking place around them but. The woman ready for an engaging soiree in 14 wears a classic black dress and pearls. coiffed. As Sherman the artist captures Sherman the subject on ﬁlm. then. rather. Reminiscent of much performance art. for a prim and seemingly conventional woman appears privy to some sinister revelation that strikes horror in her heart. Thus the openness to advances suggested by her clothing is thrown into question if not negated by her body language. Phelan uses language that parallels
. complete with eyeliner and teased hair. we do not get what we expected. There is an uncanny quality to Sherman’s expression here that lends the still a truly disturbing aura. then. convey a frightened rebelliousness if not a desire to ﬂee. Indeed. Yet this woman’s facial expression tells us that she is on anything but stable ground as she visits the downtown. Peggy Phelan has commented on how performance art allows a unique body to stand out in relief and declare its autonomy from the appropriating patriarchal system. for there is something deeply unsettled and unsettling about this image. The downtown visitor in 17 offers an equally unsettling expression.316
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their respective outings and have been dressed. She disrupts. and thus subverts the scenario that she herself has helped create. As in still 2. the cultural order that her appearance so readily invokes. Their eyes reveal great discomfort. the deep sense of uncertainty that pervades each still nevertheless manages to unseat any complacency into which this tradition may have fallen. yet her overtly sexual clothing cannot hide the hesitation and indeed anxiety made visible in her facial expression. and made up in traditional fashion. The extended eyeliner and eerie stillness endow this face with mysterious. especially in 17 where the chilling look of disquiet has an arresting impact. the body on display stands out and emphasizes her uniqueness by not supplying us with what we expected. gothic overtones that work against the contemporary setting. While stylistically images 14 and 17 both conﬁrm a traditional interpretation of femininity. wrongly impressed with its own authority. The visitor’s ﬂowered sweater and protective headscarf all imply the comfort and reassurance of controlled traditional categories. as her strangely ﬁxated glance suggests nothing short of terror. rather than conﬁrms.

and linguistically. it can present the world with aspects of itself that do not comply with the expected performance. but to undermine their credibility as sources of cultural authority. nonmetaphorical. and pain. it stands ready to signify oppositional meaning. Instead. Capable of rebellion. Only by speaking within the conﬁnes of tradition’s norm can the female body’s performance demonstrate the tenuousness of that norm. in Sherman’s art. the body is not inscribed within a hermetically sealed text. But in moving from the aims of metaphor. Always assigned a cultural role. the overarching social order and the individual on whom cultural meaning rests. displaying unexpected. idiosyncratic. For what is unique.17 Performance art thus forever insists that. and committed to a singular performance or an unusual interpretation does not lend itself to the shared meanings of cultural metaphor. The body in performance art is resistant. reproduction. it reveals subversion rather than compliance. Performance is the attempt to value that which is nonreproductive. it highlights all that resists the mainstream’s grasp. empty. all that remains ‘‘unmarked’’ by standard readings and hackneyed conventions. performance marks the body itself as loss. In its uniqueness. a ‘‘loss’’ within a society that is more a fractured totality than a seamless whole. creative use of well-rehearsed cultural norms functions not to prolong their imaginative control. Rather. ‘‘Performance’s independence from mass production.18 Hence. only its status as a double agent can reveal the unmarked. displacement. thereby drawing attention to the slippage that occurs between the general and the particular. the exhaustive. unrehearsed elements that defy the usual routine. devoid of conferred narratives or preassigned values. explaining how the uniqueness of both a given body and a given performance resist absorption into larger cultural tropes in ways that successfully undermine the assigned meanings that strive to engulf individuals. is its greatest strength. the individual
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that of Adorno’s critical theory. Sherman’s art overwhelmingly proclaims that the female body. like Sherman’s early stills. Indeed.’’ writes Phelan. deeply inscribed in the text of femininity. despite appearances. economically. unrehearsed dimensions of our identities. Performativity unleashes the double-sided meanings that accompany cultural inscription. technologically. and pleasure to those of metonymy. Performance approaches the Real through resisting the metaphorical reduction of the two into the one. stands capable of disrupting that text thanks precisely to its own inscription.

a formal chapeau becomes a silly hat. Thanks to this ongoing transformation. failing and succeeding at the same time: ‘‘That’s her. and Sherman successfully afﬁrms the subversive. The topic is simultaneously ‘‘Cindy Sherman’’ and ‘‘Cindy Sherman?’’ And despite the overriding ambiguity that this produces regarding the artist’s identity—is not the point of an interview to make oneself known to another?—she never lets go of a conﬁdent tone in speaking about her art’s creative purpose. is spared the worries of appropriation that plague Adorno’s modernism. though.’’ * * *
. thanks to this mimesis. open-ended. Everything about her appearance morphs into something radically different: blond hair becomes brown. Yet as she begins to talk about herself and her work. which is part serious. as the interview comes to a close. Sherman goes through the motions of being a job interviewee. the free fall induced by her constant metamorphosis in fact becomes the subject of the performance. True. and her hopes for the future. Sherman’s conventional readings of the female body are only deceptively staid: she mimetically undercuts femininity’s meanings. but intellectually challenged by the sight of gender’s frailty. a voice strives to identify their collective ensemble. part bone ﬁde interview. Thus. If Sherman’s photography seems unwilling to repent. part performance art. her rise to success. As she discusses her training. she avoids making deﬁnitive statements about the speciﬁc intent of her art. and humor us. her appearance constantly changes right before our eyes in ways that amaze. Importantly. as a profound instability comes to occupy center stage.318
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performer need not repent as he or she demonstrates that order’s propensity toward implosion. uncertain feeling that nevertheless keeps the viewer not only entertained. and the setting loses its original formality to take on a slippery. reading glasses become sunglasses.’’ And as the panoply of Sherman’s assumed personae ﬂash on the screen in all their various guises. Yet the indeterminacies of her ever-mutating identity themselves reveal the emancipatory power of the unmarked. the interview’s playful deconstruction never causes Sherman to lose control of the process. Indeed. the same can easily be said of her witty videotaped Interview with Cindy Sherman (1980). and business attire becomes a bathing suit. unappropriated dimension of identity. the interviewer states. Sherman talks about her art in ways that confuse what is happening. showing up in an ofﬁce suitably dressed for the occasion. and. the interview ultimately seems unrelated to a job. confuse. healing power of the imagination. part spoof—that is. ‘‘It’s been nice meeting all of you. For without question.

so does Sherman’s art move forward as it afﬁrms. things are not what they seem. Adorno. Brian O’Connor. Adorno. Mass. 29. Brian O’Connor. Theodor Adorno. ‘‘Arnold Schoenberg. 6. The Authoritarian Personality. all the more dissonant. in collaboration with Else FrenkelBrunswick and Daniel Levinson (New York: W. 248. 11. Aesthetic Theory. C. 1994). 1979). Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Theodor Adorno. Hutcheon. from within. 252. Her art shares in the hopeful dimension of Adorno’s aesthetic theory inasmuch as it. 3.: Blackwell. for only those on intimate terms can act as double agent and expose the Achilles’ heel. As Adorno saw true potential in the atonal music of Schoenberg and Berg. ed. 253. Hutcheon. 8. Irony’s Edge. Lenhardt (Malden. While Adorno feels that modernism’s investment in the powers that be make it necessary to atone— that is. Adorno. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge. trans.
Notes
1. 1993). By drawing attention to the unharnessed. 9. 5. 2000). C.’’ 252. the possibility of something different. displays a ` refractory quality vis-a-vis the reigning cultural paradigm. trans. trans. 1874–1951. 4. ed. Adorno. undomesticated residual of current gender roles. 2000). 179. the thematics of performativity hold out hope for rearranged social meanings much as Adorno holds out hope thanks to modernism’s unappropriated cultural stance. Aesthetic Theory. Irony’s Edge. 13.: Blackwell. 282. though. she sets in motion a staid rebellion. Adorno. too. See Theodor Adorno. all the more painfully irresolute—Sherman reveals a conﬁdence and ease as she works comfortably within the established lexicon of femininity’s meanings. Aesthetic Theory. to be all the more radical.’’ in The Adorno Reader. 10. Mass. 13. Adorno. Quoted in Linda Hutcheon. ‘‘The Autonomy of Art. W. Importantly.
. eager to demonstrate that within the thematics of gender.’’ in The Adorno Reader. She operates from within gendered meanings in order to reveal their uncertainties. Norton. Sherman does not share Adorno’s anxieties about the dark irony of emancipatory art. Unrepentant. 2. ‘‘The Autonomy of Art. 7. Lenhardt (Malden. 30.Unmarked and Unrehearsed
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The feminist performance art of Cindy Sherman thus presents the aesthetics of the female body in ways that parallel Adorno’s understanding of modernist art’s redemptive potential. 12.

far from providing the grounds for political agency. Equivalence.1 Elizabeth Spelman believes that much of Western feminist theory. and Exploitation
Gillian Howie
Recent feminist theorists. of differences. Through critiques of essentialism. arguing that. actually internalizes a general philosophical tendency to reduce differences to sameness—a
. and even eradication. when struggling to articulate common grounds between women. raise objections to the exclusive tendencies within feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s. named by some as third wave.15
The Economy of the Same
Identity. third-wave feminists resist the ‘‘seductive’’ promise of inclusive identity. the assertion of commonalities among women leads to the neglect.

The Predication of Kinds
Our understanding that a physical object persists through time seems to be primordial and commonsensical. Negative dialectics. In an attempt to make these interests explicit. while showing how interests determine the conditions of experience. does offer a way to develop such an understanding.322
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tendency apparent in the classiﬁcation of individuals into two kinds: ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female.’’5 Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics. This reorientation would clarify the prior and consequent facts of sex-based identiﬁcation as being constitutive of identity and. while at the same time addressing some of the concerns identiﬁed by third-wave feminists. also allows us to think that a ‘‘girl’’ is something other than what we declare her to be. His analysis of interests can help us to move away from the (merely) psychodynamic model of the economy. By maintaining that there is something true designated by the concept of girlhood. however. I believe. Luce Irigaray believes that the existence of an object matters less than the simple effect of a representation upon the subject: its reﬂection in the imagination of a man.’’3 Indeed.’’2 The dimorphic assignment of properties to bodies and then their representation in terms of masculine and feminine is considered to be part of an economy ‘‘that claims to include the feminine as the subordinate term in a binary opposition masculine/feminine’’ but actually excludes the feminine and produces it as that ‘‘which must be excluded for the economy to operate. and I conclude by examining how Adorno might help us to reorient cognition in a way that would begin to tackle third-wave concerns. also suggest a way to think of identity noninstrumentally. Adorno’s materialist dialectics opens a way to think about the concrete nature of group identity and to explore the interests underlying the attribution (or construction) of common identity.4 But in response to these postmodernist theories. I shall revisit the question of how economic and gender interests might coincide and create contradictory position for feminine subjectivity. What is it for
. importantly. Yet questions such as. Toril Moi proposes that we should move away from the problem of ‘‘sex and gender’’ because it cannot provide a concrete historical understanding of what it means ‘‘to be a woman.

Judith Butler suggests that the insistence on a stable subject actually generates multiple refusals to accept the category. and nominalists would have us believe. and so identiﬁes an x as X. But Adorno then draws our attention to the fact that while deﬁnitions strive to communicate something about a particular object. or real. apart from anything. Skeptical about traditional metaphysical notions of stable and consistent identity. Adorno makes an important contribution to the vexed question of identity at this point by insisting on the fact that the principle of identity has a necessary cognitive role. and for thought to have any content an individual x must have already been identiﬁed as an X. any deﬁnition is an identiﬁcation. According to Moi. intuitively. The concept of identity is involved in the ontological claims that an object persists over time and that different objects can be grouped together. as Enlightenment thinkers. one would like to respond that individuals are named and grouped together because of features they share and that this identity is neither arbitrary nor merely an effect of discursive practices. rationalists.7 My argument is that there is a way to make sense of these ‘‘natural’’ groupings. this intuition is shared by de Beauvoir.9 This means that when we think about an object and attempt to communicate something about it. which is not naively realist. other forms of cognition merely express what an object falls under.8 Indeed. a way that is sensitive to the fact that properties of objects are mind-independent. This is a critical distinction between thought that intends. according to Adorno. Identity is also an epistemological principle—it enables us to point out and then say something about an individual.’’ My point is that we can do this without having to resort to prurient forms of scientiﬁc or metaphysical essentialism. because.The Economy of the Same
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an object at one time to be the same as an object at another? seem to require an account of the identity of the object. which means deciding that it not a Y.6 Yet. My core argument is that contemporary. and to the dynamic conditions that affect classiﬁcation. is tied to entities. and cognitive strategies that simply subsume individuals under universal categories: a distinction between intentionality and instrumentalism. we have to identify it: to release thought from this principle of identity would immobilize it. third-wave. we cannot think without identifying. I will attempt to demonstrate how we can use Adorno’s materialism. Thinking. antiessentialist arguments are similar to this analysis of instrumental reasoning and that
. to make sense of identity claims related to ‘‘being-a-woman. who questions whether the concept ‘‘woman’’ is really empty of content.

which means that a number of individuals can share or partake in the same universal properties. The problem of reductionism is well rehearsed in the philosophy of mind. and so there are some straightforward reasons for rejecting these essentialist accounts of natural-kind groupings.’’ seem intuitively obvious. Following Jay Bernstein. I accept that ‘‘conceptualisation is the determination of an intrinsically indeterminate. or have in common These things are called universal properties and can be exempliﬁed by more than one individual. for example. for example. whereas other acts of discrimination. If these properties are necessary for x to be an X. ‘‘men’’ and ‘‘women. I believe. such as male and female. while classiﬁcation by means of similarity relationships offers a way to move beyond the constructivist/essentialist debate. where contemporary concerns tend to circle around the problem of eliminativism that is. Classiﬁcation according to common property is. Feminist critiques of essentialism tend to object to the notion that any property can stand outside sociohistoric processes and to the attendant assumption that every individual has properties in common with other individuals. or are signiﬁcantly similar. is at best redundant. There are two principal ways to justify classiﬁcation: each individual exempliﬁes a common property or the group is deﬁned through similarity relationships.324
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Adorno goes one step further by offering a way to think about real group identity noninstrumentally. some classiﬁcations. being little use in explaining natural kind groupings. the proper target for feminist antiessentialists. separating objects into two kinds. I would like to suggest a way to think about the nonarbitrary nature of the classiﬁcation of individuals into groups. Essential properties are usually considered to be ahistorical. albeit never fully determinate. without embracing an alternative metaphysical system. whether talk of ‘‘mental events’’ should be eliminated. as beyond the inﬂuence of the social and historical world. separating individuals into groups. an account of the essential nature of individuals is unable to chronicle change over time and thus.11 A metaphysical realist would claim that where objects agree in attributes.’’10 In the process of determining. ‘‘hats’’ and ‘‘frogs. ﬁne-grained and dense experiential base. The second problem is that of reductionism. there is some one thing they share. the property is also described as essential to the identity of the thing. but essentially determinable.
.13 First.’’ are more controversial. First of all.12 Metaphysical and scientiﬁc realism about essences run into a number of well-documented problems.

come into play where it is vital to differentiate between organs that are alike in some but not all respects. we are at a football match. the criteria by which any difference between the might be discerned having been disposed of.16 Hill argues that there is a fundamental difference between identity and weak forms of equivalence (similarity in some respects). ´ Defending a weak doctrine of natural kinds. Finally. and still entertain the idea of group identity. and interchangeable precisely because they have been logically stripped of whatever might distinguish them. illuminating this through an example of an organ transplant. it cannot really survive problems that arise when explaining why one individual ought to be assigned to one group rather than another. The description of essential natures in substructural terms overly compresses and then translates available information about the object. and common substructural features. instead of working on the car in a garage. he points out that the unambiguous nature of the classiﬁcation depends on context. indiscernible. concerns the difﬁculty with reducing one level of description. a social event to a biological occurrence. those at the gate will dismiss our arguments that the hard metal object in our hand is a ´ piston and not a weapon or a hammer. Offering the example of an apparently straightforward classiﬁcation of a piston in the general economy of the car. she offers a defense of a similarity thesis. with wider application. One can remain perfectly agnostic about essential properties.’’ she writes. The members formed by abstraction are identical. Coming at the problem from a slightly different angle. even if realism about essences could withstand these criticisms. John Dupre argues that questions concerning natural kinds can only be answered in relation to some speciﬁcation of the goal underlying the intent to classify an object.14 Dupre’s argument has ramiﬁcations for the realist position. here healthy
.’’15 Instead. because it means that both the existence of groups offers no evidence for essential properties and that classiﬁcatory taxonomies are open to critical scrutiny. whereby group identity depends on similarities between individuals: individuals have a property in common only in the sense that each bears a similarity relation to every other member of the kind. marking a difference between identity and weak forms of equivalence. ‘‘robs individuals of their individuality. If.The Economy of the Same
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The more general problem. Clare Hill denies that the abstraction required from individuals to form a group is innocent. ‘‘Abstraction process. for example. and it is this problem of demarcation that will drive our argument forward. Intensional factors.

to make the group cohere. Classiﬁcation depends on the selection of properties (in which ways are x and y similar enough to make them S? How do x and y differ to make them S but not R?) and this selection of relevant properties takes place according to criteria related to our interests. one raised by third-wave feminists. The criteria for deciding similarity imply relevance. Marx terms this type of property a value and distinguishes between use value and exchange
. is thankfully not arbitrary and is restrained by the natures of the objects in question. then why do we think that individuals are identical (i.326
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rather than diseased parts. indeed. Natural kinds are made up of individuals that are similar enough. in relevant ways. The implication of this is that we can simultaneously maintain that individuals are grouped together into the kind ‘‘woman’’ because of similar features and that the focus on these features.’’17 Or. explained in terms of human interests. If it is the case that natural-kind identity is best explained through similarity relations. Before I explore the character of these interests.. however. Although there is a limit to the range of classiﬁcations—x cannot both be a hat and an elephant—x can be classiﬁed in a number of ways. the same) in some respects? Once again we can ﬁnd a way to answer this in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Intensional considerations mark a difference between unwanted strict identity and an equivalence that is powerful enough to stop the substitutivity of the organs from breaking down: ‘‘to say of organ x that it has properties in common with organ y essential for successful transplant is to make a weaker claim than to claim that they are identical. whether healthy or diseased. ‘‘£10. what makes these features relevant.
The Predication of Value
The proposition ‘‘This hat is £10. where he unpacks the relationship between judgments of identity and the phenomena of reiﬁcation—as elaborated by Karl Marx through his theory of value. is related to (social) function.99. can be predicated of any object. which means that attention is focused on the properties that are associated with the context-bound function of the object. The grouping of individual things into organs.99’’ predicates a property.’’ to the hat.e. Various descriptions and properties. that they share identical properties. In Theories of Surplus Value and Capital. there is a preliminary issue to address.

Signifying the break from market economics. which would leave present labor adding value. two chairs can be exchanged for one table. an average degree of intensity and of skill must be supposed. the common feature must be found elsewhere. is generated and accumulated (M1-C-M2).18 Goods have uses dependent on their particular qualities and properties and.99’’ and ‘‘This chair is £12. As they have differing. by abstracting from particular productive endeavors. a good can enter into exchange relationships. Marx’s entire theory of value is an account of how we quantify values so that goods can stand in a speciﬁc ratio.19 Given that the value of any commodity is only the sum of past and present labor. Reformulated. The propositions ‘‘This hat is £10. uses. measured in units of time that are socially necessary to the production of the object. materials) is simply transferred to the new commodity. that is.99’’ are related insofar as both predicate value and those values are differing magnitudes of the labor that is required to make the two goods in question. In order to make this judgment of general productivity. it measures the same quality. This
. this is the claim that although value indicates different quantities of labor. because of these uses. in this case 2:1. Marx argues that the universal feature is that they are products of labor. current labor produces values additional to the value of ‘‘dead’’ labor in the system of production. This is not a measurement of any particular productive endeavor but is an abstract or general measurement: the socially necessary labor time taken to produce a use value under conditions of production common in society. Reﬁning this somewhat. and. an explanation has to be offered for the difference in magnitudes. Capitalism is a system of production in which. Marx investigates how labor can be quantiﬁed and suggests that the quantities are amounts of labor time it takes to produce a commodity. stands in a relationship to other commodities: a ratio of magnitudes. now converted into money. Marx contends that the value of past labor (machinery. The measurement in all cases is of the same thing—labor—but the measurement distinguishes between amounts of labor. and for the apparent generation of values. according to Marx.The Economy of the Same
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value. we are left with the average amount of labor measured in units of time. The good. measurement is only possible because the commodities all share something. A ratio between commodities is a ratio of quantities. in the process of exchange. disguises an important social fact. If. sometimes incommensurable. value. According to Marx. for example. The simple predication of value. now a commodity. then the table has twice the value of the chairs.

in this instance. and more signiﬁcantly. distinct goods or particular productive endeavors. which means that essential relations of production are mystiﬁed. the individual infers that the value of an object must rest with the object as a natural property and thus goods appear to be exchanged with one another according to their own natural qualities. The value of labor is an exchange value.’’21 According to this characterization of the production process. The simple predicative judgment not only neglects the use values of the object but also. This
. Incidentally. which are measurements of units of production time. Because this process alienates the individual not only from other individuals but also from the object. and like any other such value. it is the time taken to produce it: the commodiﬁcation of labor. the individual cannot see that the value of an object originates from his or her labor. depends on it being the case that unlike things. Bourgeois society. creativity. The value of labor must be worth less than the values that labor produces: exploitation. appear as if they are alike or equal and quantiﬁable.328
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would mean that current labor must generate all value.99’’ predicate exchange values. The rate of exploitation is the difference between the value of labor and the values that labor produces. This time tends to be ‘‘cashed out’’ in terms of the values the laborer consumes to sustain him. The world comes into sight as inverted. The propositions ‘‘This hat is £10. treats a social relationship (labor and its exploitation) as though it were a natural property belonging to the thing itself: reiﬁcation.or herself and his or her family. the value of labor must differ in magnitude from the exchange values of the commodities produced by labor. for example. Mistaken about the origin of value. makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. sociality and control. including surplus values. each individual experiences the commodiﬁcation of his or her labor. s/he receives a wage equivalent to his or her value: the bundle of sustaining commodities. The judgment of identity. explain Adorno and Horkheimer. For there to be a surplus available in the system. the loss of initiative.20 Frederic Jameson notes that judgments based on sameness are above all judgments premised on the equivalence of value: ‘‘the possibility we have historically constructed of comparing them when in terms of their use value they remain incomparable.99’’ and ‘‘This chair is £12. The predication of value is permitted through the abstraction of general indicators from particular endeavors and depends upon the commodiﬁcation and exploitation of labor. this means that when a worker receives a fair wage.

A simple judgment F (x). where dissimilar objects are exchangeable and exchange value predicated as a natural quality. grasping similarities according to our interests. reiﬁcation—both a social phenomena and a way of thinking. social relations supporting standard equivalence.’’ the various groupings hat. Speciﬁcally. ‘‘This is a hat’’ and ‘‘This hat is red. Adorno suggests that a particular cognitive orientation is a consequence of the experience of this way of living and producing. as is the move from the cognition of similarity to that of sameness. an uncontroversial aspect of thought. guided both by interest and context. and the similar as identical. might I select its color as being essential to its group membership? A red hat may be the only hat to wear to a particular football match.22 From the predication of price we can infer social facts. we can recognize that abstraction. red.23 If. suggests.
Similarity and Exchange Relationships
In thinking how it might be possible for a number of individuals to talk about ‘‘being-a-woman. I attempt to
. For the sake of my argument. then it is possible to make some move toward offering an alternative to the psychic explanation for judgments of sameness and identity. is. predicated as a natural property. the salient point is that a particular kind of cognitive orientation is a consequence of a form of production. is only possible because the object is abstracted from its (productive) relations. and a tendency to see the dissimilar as similar. where x is a commodity and F is its value. this is why Capital begins with an analysis of the commodity form. Indeed.The Economy of the Same
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appearance of identity. are the principal features of this cognitive orientation. If we accept this account. Why. for Adorno. from the preceding commentary. for Adorno. because it marks identity of a slightly different kind. for example. and red hat are determined by a selection of similarities. however. and an explanation for the superﬁcial simpliﬁcation of these facts. Identifying something as a particular kind of thing.’’ I have focused on the concrete nature of group identity and argued that group identity is best explained through similarity relations and then offered an explanation for why similarity relations became perceived in terms of sameness. simpliﬁcation. My suggestion so far is that if we take two propositions. this cognitive orientation also enables the interests governing production to be disguised.

I might comment on its properties and say that it is woolly.’’ shown through practical inferences. which means that if I wished to secure the ‘‘ought. is also determined by normative linguistic and social practices. Now. if I see someone bleeding badly.’’ to justify the inference.99. from the apprehension of similarities to the identiﬁcation and subsumption of different particulars under a common universal (concept or law). as a starting point. and determine. then I (know that I should) apply a tourniquet. from its context as well as conceive similarities where there are principally distinctions.25 Meaning and comprehension are only possible if the context and consequence of the utterance are grasped. Because I can predicate exchange value to the object. has been explained as an effect of a particular form of production. the world. according to our interests is a version of pragmatism. The shift. it removes all external (ethical and social) authorities. depends upon classifying and identifying objects. the notion that behavior is guided by way of implicit knowledge according to norms of speaking and acting.26 Material inference. but implicitly. its meaning. is when a move from one proposition to another is guided by the content of the concepts. and red and cost £10. When reason considers that it alone supplies the rules that guide thinking. which produced the hat in the ﬁrst place. ‘‘know-how. which give shape to. In this latter case. it is likely that when I consider the hat I will also overly simplify the relationship between the object and its other predicates. For example. The steps in implication can be spelled out formally. the natural appearance of economic value disguises the social fact that the value of the hat embodies the exploited and alienated labor.330
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offer a fuller description of a hat that I will be wearing tonight. According to Bernstein. I would like to explore how cognition guided by the conception of similarity could be so easily overwritten and distorted. The idea that we group together objects into kinds. rather than by any ﬁrst-order logical rules concerning validity and bivalence. and the criteria by which objects are grouped together depends on human interest.24 The vocabulary of logic makes explicit what is already known practically. So. outlined in the previous section. I would formulate an explicit rule. rather than material implication. warm. Describing Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit as a milestone in theoretical philosophy. The content of a concept. Jurgen Habermas insists that Brandom is ¨ leading a pragmatist revival by taking. This results
. and then subjects its own principles to scrutiny. I will tend to abstract the object and my consideration of the object.

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment.’’ Detecting a historical modiﬁcation of practical to logical inference. So it is the presentation of the social or ethical claim as a formal principle that opens the way for an ultimately skeptical rejection of the moral inference: ‘‘for the reduction of ethics itself to an instrumental and. as well as a general tendency to think instrumentally (abstraction. Additionally. predication. and identiﬁcation depend upon selecting relevant properties.28 To summarize the argument so far. thinking tends to be pragmatic. and necessary laws. and these managed to disguise the interests
. culturally and institutionally. Their historical account notes an original pragmatic orientation of thought and observes how this practical and material orientation of thought became masked. until the conception—perhaps even perception—of the unlike as like. then the determination of the world will mirror interests of the dominant social forces. so that the shape and organization of things in the world is observed to be the consequence of apparently objective. Bernstein’s account returns him to the Enlightenment and he argues that the key with which to understand the claim. He argues that the key with which to understand the claim. which determine the world and carve it at its joints. appeal and authority of logical inference is to grasp how the authority established itself. Adorno and Horkheimer bring into play Marx’s theory of value and reiﬁcation to explain this tension between the pragmatic and instrumental nature of thought. and relevance is related to human interest. natural. it demonstrates the hidden nature of the interests giving shape to the world and explains the conﬂictual makeup of the social interests. If those interests.The Economy of the Same
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in a way of thinking commonly associated with instrumentality: a form of reasoning. quantiﬁcation. simpliﬁcation. which prioritizes the gaining of an end and concentrates on discovering the most efﬁcient means for achieving that end. because conceptualization. reﬂect the contested nature of social interest. appeal. remnant. The argument is not just that classiﬁcation is interested but that because of the type of interests in question certain sociohistorical changes were effected. Bernstein develops the historical movement from practical to logical inference. culturally and institutionally. and authority of logical inference is to grasp how the authority established itself. The theory of reiﬁcation explains how we became estranged from our own productive activity. sometimes inhuman.27 Picking up the distinction between reason as activity and reason that masks this activity. and efﬁciency) became the norms of modernity and instrumental reason became the organizing principle of capitalist societies.

principally chromosomes and hormonal excretion: a form of substructural organization. is informed by these principles and that there are fairly stable individual things. male or female. and reasserts the economic nature of the ‘‘economy of the same. according to the abstraction of general properties from particular endeavors or products. The theory of value discloses how the perception of similarities became the perception of sameness through the subjection of individuals to the exchange mechanism. which may have properties shared by other individuals things. The dimorphic distribution of social roles and beneﬁts has been historically justiﬁed by secondary sexual characteristics.332
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and to alter the manner of cognition. which are causally related to primary sexual characteristics. Any justiﬁcation for classifying individuals into two groups. This establishes more clearly how the move from judgments of similarity to judgments of sameness is linked to the development of capitalism. which are taken to be a necessary causal consequence of primary characteristics. that the original neutral act of discrimination. feminist antiessentialists are right to be skeptical about the existence of natural kinds and to be concerned about the political impact of arguments that explain the (moral) organization of the world in these terms. breasts. Essentialist justiﬁcations. We now have a fairly thick explanation for ways in which all thought is implicated in an antagonistic social base. I have argued that problems with this type of essentialism need not push us into rejecting the concrete nature of group identity because a qualiﬁed similarity thesis is
.’’
Exchange Relationships and Gender
Due to the pragmatic nature of thought. by virtue of essential properties. The later scientiﬁc interpretation of essentialism took these properties to be biological features (having wombs. on positing speciﬁc qualities essential to x’s identity and claiming that these qualities are common to all individuals grouped together as X. between the unlike and alike. metaphysical and scientiﬁc. in the main. reproduces the form of arguments for natural kinds discussed and rejected above. where even the unlike can be exchanged for one another. child-bearing capacity). The classiﬁcation of x or y as male or female depends. for natural kinds tend to presume that classiﬁcation can be premised on uncontested logical principles.

almost certainly. qualities are selected because they endorse a sex-based hierarchy. The presentation of qualities as polar opposites is ‘‘heavily imbricated in the patriarchal value system: each opposition can be analysed as a hierarchy where the feminine side is always seen as the negative powerless instance. presenting it as natural and necessary.’’31 Actually. Extending Adorno’s analysis of the Enlightenment. is contingent. associated with capitalist exchange. perhaps through the same institutions.32 This would mean that we
. It also manages to disguise the contingent and social determination of the world. whereby individuals are located within complex genealogical ﬁliations. This requires an assessment of how selection is interested. If the principle of identity does ﬁnd its social model in exchange. organized. indeed. whereby women are united passively as a series. metonymical representation deﬁnes pornography. for the whole object and that various individuals are classiﬁed as the same according to common and ‘‘natural’’ properties. Second.29 I believe that two antiessentialist accounts of kinds. First. we would expect to ﬁnd that features of the object come to stand.The Economy of the Same
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more convincing anyway. gender as seriality. A social selection of properties constitutes the kind ‘‘woman’’ and. To think that it is either natural or necessary would be another example of reiﬁed thinking. are versions of the similarity thesis. as the authority of logical inference was established. at the very least facilitates gendered classiﬁcation and determination. women ﬁnd that their (exchange) value is indeed a social property: all that supports a particular image of masculinity. according to which individuals are considered to be relevantly similar. where nonidentical individuals and performances become commensurable. the result of alienation. a few properties do invoke the whole individual. in the sexual economy. scientiﬁc frames of reference managed to mask gender bias during the Enlightenment in similar ways and. have to be selected. and gender as genealogy. The cognitive orientation.30 But—and this is an important caveat—any similarity thesis concedes that properties. If a qualiﬁed similarity thesis is the most convincing explanation of kind identity. and the consequent effects of such an organization. As goods. and embedded. the choice of criteria for organizing individuals into groups is related to social interests and this interested nature of judgment has been obscured and hidden from view (reiﬁcation). the organization of individuals into these groups. one could argue that putatively neutral. then arguments that posit essential natural qualities of femininity and masculinity—and explain the distribution of social goods accordingly—are either false or redundant. metonymically.

but these same features are also present in thought described as ‘‘phallogocentric. or focus on their gendered nature. simpliﬁes. Although I am remaining agnostic as to the various permutations of the causal relationships between gender interests and economic interests— because here all I wish to indicate is that these problems need to be
. far from being displaced by the problem of globalization.and single-system Marxist and socialist feminist theorists of the ‘‘second wave.’’ I have named a style of thinking.
Globalization. might result in an economic description of those interests. revealing nothing about the contemporary quality of ‘‘being-a-woman’’ within a newly transformed global economy.34 However. Feminization. which abstracts.’’ So far I have argued that capitalism facilitated a way of thinking about the world that protected and reproduced a gendered hierarchy. such as Linda Alcoff and Vrinda Dalmiya. from ‘‘know how’’ to ‘‘know that. and takes similar individuals to be identical.’’ This is a term used for a style of thinking that presumes three principles of logic and then classiﬁes things into two kinds. In what follows. Adorno offers us a way to consider the connection between group identity and interests.33 Those who argue either that thought is instrumental or that it is phallogocentric would agree that interests govern discrimination and classiﬁcation. I will show how the questions raised by second-wave Marxist and socialist feminists are. building on the questions elaborated here about identity thinking. with the work of certain critical theorists. or examine the intersections between economic and gender interests. such as Jay Bernstein.334
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could bring together the work of certain feminist epistemologists. to discern the gendered implication of the move from practical to logical inference. These differences produce the same puzzles that absorbed radical and dual. and it might be tempting to argue that because the frame of reference is modernist it is anachronistic. establishing a (gendered) hierarchy between them. critically relevant to an understanding of ‘‘being-a-woman’’ in ‘‘post’’ modern global economies. as instrumental. an analysis of the (social) interests. driving classiﬁcation. and Rationalization
Working with a Marxist frame of reference.

so. If this is the case. concentrating on the features of global economies. which has never been immune from these processes. . Self-deﬁned third-wave feminist Jodi Dean describes how global technoculture affects women. broadcasting. and entailed by. Dean notes that these economic changes are in the interests of (some) women. access to education and fairness in the labor market. the consolidation of wealth in the hands of transnational corporations and the migration and immigration of people. features of modern capitalism. She deﬁnes technoculture as ‘‘the rise of networked communication [such as] the Internet. for example. and technologically and organizationally dynamic. affording them the beneﬁts of a choice of living pattern. marks the feminization of the laboring process. the rise of consumerist culture and the corresponding sites of impoverishment. arguing that technoculture heralds the end of patriarchy. for example. starvation and death. Alternatively. as one of the main features of global capitalism. . is as implicated in its social context as ever.The Economy of the Same
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revisited—I do believe that there is nothing ‘‘post’’ about our modern economy. the growth-oriented. the feminist ﬁght for equal opportunities seems to have been won. and the global production and dissemination of motion pictures. and to a restructuring not only of the market. to the domination of a particular type of productive commercialism. The term feminization relates to features within the restructuring process that depend upon existing inequities. to the integrated operations of distribution and political order. but also of the state and civil society—processes that are mediated through local economic and political structures. . To the extent that global capitalism delivers on liberal aspirations. to the sense that the world. It may be taken to refer to a newly integrated market. the activities of the global ﬁnancial market involves the emergence of a feminized ‘‘interna-
. . and the power that accrues to the occupation of the traditional role of family provider. technologies and capital. and . satellite. David Harvey notes that the principal characteristics of ‘‘post-Fordism’’ are ﬂexible accumulation and ﬂexible labor and argues that they are perfectly consistent with. then growth in real values still depends upon the commodiﬁcation and exploitation of living labor: the gap between the value of labor and values labor produces. one could argue that ﬂexible labor.35 Yet aside from all this. violence. through information technology. has contracted.’’36 However. Thought. control in relationships. offering. . Globalization has many and varied meanings.

parenting. Throughout the preceding discussion of identity. patriarchal social relations contribute to their production as the new forces of super-exploitation. and caring for elderly relatives—and the tendency to reduce this necessary labor is witnessed in various ways. and the domestic labor required for the reproduction of the labor force. and thus the equalization of male and female labor power. which requires an expanding ﬁeld of producers. There are.’’ largely casual and insecure service economy.’’37
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
In the attempt to break the spell that captures female identity within a masculinist sexual economy. in the main. her insights can shed some light on these apparently diverse strands of global capitalism. who. They are the true surplus army of labor in the current conjecture. child care. plays a signiﬁcant role. she contends. But these are the ‘‘private’’ responsibility of the individual producer. The fact that the reproduction of labor (childbirth. Global restructuring will. goes some way in explaining the contradictory pressures experienced by women. feminist criticisms of essentialism center on how individuals are subsumed under universal concepts. Lisa Vogel. some straightforward effects of the tendency within capitalism to minimize necessary labor over the long term—to ensure the maximum availability of labor force participation—while simultaneously requiring the reproduction of labor power. in the expansion of childcare provision and labor-saving devices. The reproduction of labor includes all that is within the ‘‘private’’ sphere—domestic labor. Individual reproduction of labor is necessary to the smooth running of capital and yet is antagonistic to the tendency to appropriate surplus labor.336
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tionalized. for example. comments on the structural role of women in the labor market. In their case. a second-wave feminist theorist. in which male. among other things. abstraction—including its philosophical
. aggravate the tension between the structural tendency toward the free availability of labor power. still occupy these roles. but principally female. and domestic labor) is antagonistic to the creation of surplus value. Gayatri Spivak comments that ‘‘the worst victims of the recent exacerbation of the international division of labor are women. and so consumption is increased and the stratiﬁcation of the labor market further embedded. migrant labor.

38 The underlying argument. The individual really does experience the processes simultaneously as natural and disinterested and as interested and conventional. are contingent and thoroughly interested. Although the form of cognition is at one with mechanisms of exchange. The conventional character of natural kinds does not make the groupings any less signiﬁcant. so too is the claim that women’s reproductive organs suffer when they are educated. preexist this particular form of production.The Economy of the Same
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equivalent in logic and in the form of universals—has been revealed. and similarity was viewed as identity.42 Similarly. whereby the interests governing selection became hidden. be false to take this to conﬁrm the original assumption of natural dimorphism. and creating the situation in which it is possible to predict likely behavior. Indeed. the classiﬁcations and inferences drawn concerning behavior. guided by social interest. however. This is why the categories essence and appearance still have theoretical work to do. to be at one with the logic of equivalence and exchange: the logic of capital. although they conceal their conditions. If. just as the claim ‘‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’’ is false. just as the predication of value to a
. one were to insist that there are two sex-based kinds. because it is also the case that the structures and mechanisms imposing speciﬁc similarity relations. with a materialist underpinning. Essence is that which makes the facts what they are. for example.’’ but it also established that natural groupings can be best explained in terms of similarity rather than identity and that there was an historical shift from pragmatic to an instrumental orientation of thought.40 and appearances. that is true. at another level. if one were to further insist that we can infer behavior from dimorphic sex distinctions. groupings became naturalized.41 Thinking about properties in this way enables us to distinguish between propositions. Sexual difference is also a fact. are nonetheless real. say something true and false about the object. the way that we currently think about an object. is that beyond all forms of social differentiation. that is. For example. This is where feminist antiessentialist arguments and Adorno’s analysis of instrumentalism coincide. that too is generally true. It would. classiﬁcations. it is the case that individuals identiﬁed as women undertake most of the world’s domestic labor.39 The discussion in this chapter began with the suggestion that there is still useful content in the idea of ‘‘natural kind. then. the abstraction implicit in the market system represents the domination of the general over the particular and accounts for the organization of similarities and differences into sameness and equivalence.

stamping homogeneity on the heteronomous. so too is the predication of particular properties to women. conventions. If we can develop the parallel further.47 This term refers to a reoriented cognition. It needs to express the object as distinct from the criteria of selection. Bernstein believes this type of cognitive approach must jettison bivalence and move toward what he describes as particularistic pluralism.43 Hence. The effects of the constituted world are real and can be accurately represented.44 In the same way as exchange value abstracts from particular productive endeavors. and the world will conﬁrm the truth-claim. Assuming this orientation would lead an individual to keep in mind that an object can belong to a number. which would help us to ‘‘hear the object speak. while also taking account of the tensions created at each and every moment of abstraction. of kinds.338
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commodity is real. the schematic relationship between the general and particular. is ‘‘ultimately revealed in contemporary science as the interest of industrial society. which is sensitive to the aspect of the object that preexisted any attempt to communicate something about it. but this conﬁrmation is only at the level of appearance. It means accepting that an object is not just one thing or another. one can detect the similarities and differences underlying abstract dimorphic sex-gender categories. while also recognizing how the object is mediated by the processes that operate with those criteria.45 According to Adorno and Horkheimer. thought faces a complicated task. and their presentation as identical. Epistemologically. And in the same way as exchange is a dynamic and ruthlessly totalizing mechanism. propositions can be conﬁrmed by evidence. It must be aware of the mechanisms of abstraction. however. the effect of these on the production of similarities.’’46 I have tried to insert into this analysis of the schematic relationship a gender dimension.’’ To do this. reason reaches out to organize the individual data of cognition. and which endeavors to express the object through a constellation of appropriate concepts. the ‘‘non-involved. distanced’’ knower can then assert transparent correspondence between proposition and world. the description of properties occurs after a more original determination of relevant properties and the consequent ‘‘interpellation’’ of the individual into various social mechanisms and practices. yet is still in thrall to them. while at the same time making explicit the rules. of concept and universal case. Cognitive reorientation is a term coined by Bernstein to indicate how we might make the implicit explicit and ﬁgure something like the (original) pragmatic way of thinking. although not an inﬁnite number. and interests
. institutions.

of selection. is clearly intelligible insofar as every single object subsumed under a class has characteristics not contained in the deﬁnition of the class. I conclude. Thought of the nonidentical is a thought against binary simpliﬁcation.
. of exchange) and her dissonant experiences calls for an investigation into the reﬂexivity of nonidentity. can be put in the service of an individual struggling to make sense of her own contradictory location. on her own. within which an object stands. This history can only be unlocked by an awareness of the relationship that the object has to others and to the constellation of concepts orbiting it (163). The subject is also an object (of thought.’’48 The constellation of concepts. exceeding the individual’s deﬁnition. according to Adorno. can only harmonize her beliefs and experiences with the general system through concerted manipulation and. and instrumentality and by bringing into question not only objective contradictions but also the conditions for the contradictions. and it is the thought of the nonidentical that can accommodate the concrete nature of contradiction and indicate a way to the spell of the economy of the same. thought could attempt to mimic the identiﬁcation present in the meaning of ‘‘to identify with’’ and this means being sensitive to the objective nature of contradiction (150). however. thus taking us beyond a merely academic analysis of instrumental reason. the quality ‘‘free. The nonidentical element in any identifying judgment. whose dissonant experiences are testimony to the contradiction between her own deﬁnitions and the roles she is expected to occupy. equivalence. It is with Adorno that an individual subject can begin to reconﬁgure a concrete and historical understanding of what it really means for her ‘‘to be a woman’’ within an economy that imposes equivalence and identity. is a thought against the gendered processes of global capitalism. No longer turning individuals into immutable objects (154). abstraction.The Economy of the Same
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governing the determination of groups of objects according to shared properties. for example. which is concerned with a totalizing system without itself being total. indicates the sedimented history that it carries within it. Adorno. offers a way to think about constitutive identity. cannot eliminate the objective contradictions and their emanations (153). This subject. does offer a way to make sense of dissonant experience and to grasp the contradictory nature of the conditions. This. It can also be discerned in the relationship between individuals endeavoring to achieve a quality predicated of them. Immanent critique.

’’ European Journal of Philosophy 8. Keohane. Further page references are cited parenthetically in the text. 31. Negative Dialectics. 1993).The Economy of the Same
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Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language. Adorno. 25. and State. 22–23. Dupre’s version of this is promiscuous reality. 39. Dupre. ed. 150. ‘‘Feminism. 265. Potter (London: Routledge. N. Late Marxism. and B. Gillian Rose.’’ Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer. S. 1 (2001): 1–25. Adorno. ‘‘The theoretical levelling of essence and appearance will be paralleled by subjective losses. 44. Catharine MacKinnon. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 20. 26. 43. ´ 47. Alcoff and E. Jodi Dean. Moi. 46. Gelpi (Brighton. Jameson. in Disorder of Things. 81. ed. 28. Method. 111. 85–96. 33.K. 167. and B. see Norman Geras. 34. For a discussion about different truth-values with reference to appearance and essence.’’ in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. 187. 3 (2000): 323. Gayatri Spivak. ‘‘Are Old Wives Tales Justiﬁed?’’ in Feminist Epistemologies. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Negative Dialectics. no. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge 1985). ´ 29.
. 103. R. ‘‘Gendered Representations of the Global. 2003). Munford (London: Palgrave. The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor Adorno (London: Macmillan. Gillis. ‘‘Feminism in Technoculture. It would be worth investigating the link between this and the ‘‘need’’ in thought. 30. 170. M. Jameson. Although there are clear distinctions between Habermas and Brandom.’’ a move that managed simultaneously to deauthorize traditionally female practical knowledge and to exclude women from new knowledge by excluding them from medical institutions. Howie. ‘‘Fetishism in Marx’s ‘Capital’ ’’ New Left Review 65 (January/February 1971): 69–85. ‘‘On the Genealogy of Women: A Defence of Anti-essentialism. 84. 27. argues that as the idea of essential properties does little or no work in the explanation of kind identity. Jameson. Underhill (Oxford: Oxford University Press. M. I would argue that this would be true even if one were to decide that the driver behind the classiﬁcation is ‘‘desire. Negative Dialectics. see Vrinda Dalmiya and Linda Alcoff. Late Marxism. L. G. 1988). ed. Stubbs and G. Late Marxism. 167. Rosaldo. For a discussion about the congruent nature of events that embedded a distinction between ‘‘know how’’ and ‘‘know that. no. 104. 28. 1982). the former also pursues the interested nature of reason. and Cultural Studies 23. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge. For a discussion of Young’s view of women as a series and a defense of genealogical identity. one can remain agnostic.’’ in Economy and the Changing Global Order. 40.’’ Review of Education. 36. Marxism. Negative Dialectics. 42. Adorno. 37. Adorno and Horkheimer. Sexual/Textual Politics. see Alison Stone. Adorno and Horkheimer. 96.’’ in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology. 1978). the connection between self-preservation and the control of nature. Bernstein.’’ 35. 45. 38. Pedagogy. Adorno. 2002). Toril Moi. 134. 32. ed. U.: Harvester. 41. 48. Marchland.

comparative literature. Rights. and Radical Democracy in the U. psychoanalysis. to inform constitutional clauses and legal interpretations in the ongoing building of the new South Africa. Currently. 1999) and editor of Lost in the Archives (Alphabet City Media. Long Beach.Contributors
PAUL APOSTOLIDIS is an Associate Professor at Whitman College. and The Philosophy of the Limit (Routledge. 2004). Transformations (Routledge. Labor Movement.S. 2002). Between Women and Generations (Palgrave. Cornell has authored many books. 1995). 2004). and union activism. 2002). The Imaginary Domain (Routledge. MARY CAPUTI is professor of political theory at California State University. where he teaches critical theory and U. critical theory. including Defending Ideals (Routledge. She is the coeditor of Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger (Northwestern University Press. She publishes in the areas of feminist theory. and conservative anti-gay and anti-welfare discourses. Cultural Studies in the United States.S. He is the author of Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Duke University Press. REBECCA COMAY teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and Literary Studies at the University of Toronto. DRUCILLA CORNELL is professor of political science. in 1999
. 1992).’’ She joined the faculty at California State University. At the Heart of Freedom (Princeton University Press. 1993). politics. 1998). He has published articles and essays on Adorno’s critiques of radio. Her book on American political culture and melancholia is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. JENNIFER EAGAN received her PhD in philosophy from Duquesne University in 1999. and postmodernism. Hayward. a study of Latino meatpackers’ narratives of immigration. and women and gender studies at Rutgers University. He is currently writing a book titled Hegemony and Hamburger: Immigration. Her dissertation was titled ‘‘Justice and Judgment: A Re-reading of Kant’s Second and Third Critiques. Cornell is collaboratively directing a research project in South Africa in an effort to deepen the role of African jurisprudence through ideals such as ubuntu. 2000) and co-editor of Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals (Duke University Press. She has authored numerous essays on modern continental philosophy. work.

1993) and Political Inversions (Stanford. 4 [1996]: 63–76).’’ in Exposure: Revealing Bodies. focusing on the ﬁgures of Adorno. which features the work of Theodor Adorno. aesthetics. She is currently researching constructions of ‘‘the will’’ in modern and poststructuralist thought to explore what feminists might make of this apparently quite nonfeminist concept. and others. Unveiling Representations. University of California. ‘‘Law’s Violence and the Challenge of the Feminine’’ (Studies in Law. Massachusetts. 2004). and ‘‘Controlled Exposure: Courbet’s L’origine du monde and the Woman-Thing. Recent publications include a book on the end of art (forthcoming from Stanford Press 2005) and essays on Wedekind. She is the author of ‘‘Philosophers and the Holocaust: Mediating Public Disputes’’ (International Studies in Philosophy 29 [Winter 1997]). Her publications include ‘‘Deconstructive Strategies and the Movement Against Sexual Violence’’ (Hypatia 11. 2004). postmodernism. His latest work. ed. HEBERLE is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toledo. She recently received her JD from the School of Law. Santa Cruz. 2004).346
Contributors
in a joint appointment with the Departments of Philosophy and Public Affairs and Administration. Dr. ´ RENEE J. feminism. Currently. Germany. Franks is currently working towards a JD at Harvard Law School.’’ in Encyclopedia of Government and Politics. no. EVA GEULEN teaches German literature at the University of Bonn. Politics. She is also a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Life (Duke University. ethics. Los Angeles. where he currently heads the Department of Germanic Languages. He is the author of Fascist Modernism (Stanford.’’ which appeared in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18. human rights. Mary Hawkesworth and Maurice Kogan (Routledge. and cultural theory. literary theory. MARY ANNE FRANKS currently teaches philosophy and world religions at Quincy College. She received her PhD from the Modern Languages and Literature Faculty at Oxford University in January 2004. Her research interests are psychoanalytic theory. in Uber Zizek: Perspektiven und Kritike. and literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Michel Foucault. no. 2005). 1996). SORA Y. ‘‘Von Sex ˇˇ ¨ und andere Akte’’ (Of Sex and Other Acts).
. and democratic politics. Her publications include ‘‘Obscene Undersides: Women and Evil Between the Taliban and the U. and Luce Irigaray. Los Angeles. Her publications include work on philosophical aesthetics. HAN is currently a fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School. ANDREW HEWITT is a professor of Germanic languages and comparative literature at the University of California.S. Walter Benjamin. Thomas Mann. edited by Erik Vogt and Hugh Silverman (Verlag Turia and Kant. Eagan is doing research in the areas of feminism. edited by Kathryn Banks and Joseph Harris (Peter Lang. Adorno. with an emphasis in critical race studies.. where she is active in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Program in Law and Social Thought. 1 (2003). Stifter. and Society 22 [2001]: 49–73). and ‘‘Postmodernism and the Repudiation of Grand Theory.

assessment. She is author of Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expressionism (Palgrave. and coeditor of The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (MIT Press.Contributors
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GILLIAN HOWIE is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Adorno (Routledge. 1991). social philosophy. Zuidervaart is currently completing a book on cultural politics and conducting research into theories of truth and theories of globalization. BRUCE MARTIN is an administrator at New Mexico State University at Alamogordo. 1997) and The Arts. publications from the institute’s conference series. LAMBERT ZUIDERVAART is professor of philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto and an associate member of the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Martin’s Press. 2002). She is the organizer of the Vista 360 Festival in Jackson. editor of Women: A Cultural Review’s special issue on gender and philosophy (Ashgate. and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. D. and director of the Institute for Feminist Theory and Research. and strategic planning. 2004).. 2003) and coeditor of Gender. Popular Culture. international relations. 2000). responsible for institutional research. Teaching and Research in Higher Education (Palgrave. and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge University Press. including those on American government.
. She serves on the board of Ms magazine. His primary interests lie in philosophy of discourse. and politics and ﬁlm. 2004). He also teaches political science courses. and continental philosophy. coauthor of Dancing in the Dark: Youth. the Chicago Humanities Festival. U. 2001) and Third Wave Feminism (Pelgrave. and Cultural Democracy (Macmillan/St. and he does specialized work on German philosophy from Kant through Habermas. 1991) and Artistic Truth: Aesthetics. He is the author of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (MIT Press.K. LISA YUN LEE is cofounder and director of the Public Square in Chicago. and the Electronic Media (Eerdmans. Discourse. Wyoming. She is the author of Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of Theodor W. Community. 2005).